The Week We Went Reseller Hunting (and Built a Free Bundle Art Generator)
When a developer hands us 200 Steam keys, they are trusting us with real money - every key that ends up on a grey-market site instead of in a video is a sale stolen from them. This week we shipped the tools that make that trust enforceable: dev-side claimer flags, a tamper-proof claim system, and a running tally of every bad actor we've cut. Also: a free generator that produces all your Steam bundle art in one click, and the whole hub now speaks five languages. Here's the changelog.
Founder, Mad Octopus
Where do your keys actually go?
Every key platform has the same dirty secret: a slice of "creators" are resellers, key farms and bots. Most platforms shrug. We hunt. As of today our do-not-send list holds 339 addresses we've cut permanently: grey-market resellers, curator farms that claim a key for every game and cover none, corporate press desks hoarding keys, and inbox bots. Some recent catches:
- The 25-millisecond claimer. One address "claimed" three keys from three different games within 25 milliseconds of the mail arriving. Humans don't do that - mail scanners do. Our daily claim-watch now flags every cross-game claim burst automatically, and that address is gone.
- The marketplace listing. A claimed key surfaced for sale on a grey-market bazaar. We traced the listing back to the claimer, cut them from every channel we run, and when they emailed asking to be unblocked, the answer was a polite no. Keys developers give for coverage are not stock for someone's side hustle.
- The URL editor. Someone discovered they could edit the game number in their personal claim link and walk through other games' key pools. A full audit found 27 tampered claims - every serial offender was purged, and claim links are now tamper-proof: a link only works for a game that was actually offered to that exact person.
- The dev-reported ten. One developer went through his claimer list and reported ten channels that looked wrong - non-gaming content, dead accounts, casino streams. All ten verified, all ten cut. Which is exactly why we built the next feature.
And it cuts both ways: this week we also paused 32 hoarder addresses (a dozen-plus keys each, zero content on file) and asked one simple question - show us anything you made. The honest answers ("huge backlog, haven't gotten to them yet" counts!) were restored the same day, several with streams already scheduled. The silent ones stay paused. Firm with bad actors, fair with humans.
New: flag any claimer, 👍 or 🚩
Shipped today. Both claimer lists - the one in your mailing stats and the "Who claimed a key" list in My Games - now have two little buttons on every row. 👍 means this creator delivered and you're happy. 🚩 means something smells wrong - a reseller, a fake channel, a claim that never turns into anything. Every red flag lands directly on our desk, we verify it against the channel and our claim data, and confirmed bad actors get cut from the entire base - not just your game. A thousand developers' eyes on their own claimer lists is a better fraud detector than any algorithm we could write, so we wired those eyes straight to the ban hammer.
Free bundle art for any 2-4 games
A developer emailed us this week: he'd organized a bundle outside our hub and discovered what a grind the artwork is - Steamworks wants six different capsule formats, and most indie teams don't have a spare designer. His idea: make our internal art generator available for any games. It went live the same day. The Bundle Images Generator (in the Dev Hub's Developer tools) takes 2-4 Steam games - any games, in our pool or not - and produces every bundle asset format Steamworks asks for, composed from each game's official artwork, in one ZIP. Text-free by design, because Steam's asset rules forbid extra text on capsules - what you download is what you can upload. It's the same battle-tested compositor that generates the art for every bundle matched through our hub, and it's free with a Dev Hub account.
Mailed keys meet the Creator Hub
Until this week our email campaigns and the Creator Hub were two separate worlds - a creator could hold your key from a mailing while the portal claimed they had none. Now they're one identity: keys claimed from email campaigns show up under the creator's "Your keys" in the portal, count toward their reputation tier, feed the coverage bot, and appear in your claimers list with their tier badge. One creator, one history, whichever door they came through - and no more double-claiming the same game from both channels.
AI-content transparency
A developer asked whether the pool has an AI filter - some creators won't cover AI-assisted games, and some players won't buy them. So we built one: every game with an AI-generated-content disclosure on its Steam page now carries a small "AI content" chip, and both the swipe deck and the Creator Hub catalog have a "Hide AI-disclosed" filter. The flag comes straight from each game's own Steam disclosure - we don't judge, we just surface what's already declared so everyone can choose.
Five languages and other quality of life
- The hub speaks 5 languages - the whole site and the entire Creator Hub portal now run in English, French, German, Japanese and Chinese. Creators pick their language once; it sticks.
- You stay signed in - sessions now survive browser restarts for 90 days per device. Sign in once, and the hub remembers you.
- Buried treasures - the Creator Hub's request-a-game tab gained a shelf of hidden gems: games over a year old with 90%+ positive reviews and almost no audience. Creators ask for keys, we ping the developer, everybody wins.
- Honest coverage dates - the coverage bot now records when a video was actually published, not when we found it, so your coverage timeline reads true.
Get in - it's free
The rules haven't changed: join free, add your game by its Steam appid, match with a bundle partner the same day - and now generate your bundle art while you're at it. Creators apply once, get approved by a human, and claim keys for a 330+ game catalog, in five languages. Almost everything in this post started as a message from a developer or creator. Keep them coming.