// News // 12th Feb 2015 — 9 years ago // By Andrew Duncan

Steam Ask Greenlight Projects to Not Give Keys for Votes

Revealed by the SteamDB Twitter account, Valve have asked developers to stop offering free keys in exchange for votes.

But rather than make you read all of that in an image, we've copied and pasted it here for your convenience.

Giving games in exchange for votes
This has been coming up more and more lately, and seems to warrant discussing our perspective on the practice of giving away copies of your game (either directly or as a drawing) in exchange for votes.

When you give away copies of your game in exchange for votes, you put us in a really uncomfortable position. We do not think these votes accurately reflect customer interest and it makes ourjob harder in deciding which games customers would actually buy and play on Steam.

Additionally. when you give away copies of your game for votes, then every other developer on Greenlight thinks that is now the thing they need to do in order to get noticed. We don't think that is healthy for the system or really what customers want.

We understand that running contests or giving away copies of your game can be viewed as a form of marketing. But for the purposes of Greenlight. we don't think that giving away copies of your game in exchange for votes accurately reflects genuine customer interest.

This is something we continue to take into account when evaluating titles to be greenlit. The result is that it may take significantly longer for your title to get Greenllt. as it is much more work for us to try and understand customer interest in a title that has collected some unknown number of votes in this manner.