An idea for the coin shop: whenever a highly-popular game that was already featured in it gets a big update, bring it back to the shop. Wouldn’t it be great, if this happened to a certain game that gets such an update on the 2nd of June. *cough* Brigador *cough*
I’m sure a lot of people who didn’t have the coins at the time and narrowly missed it would be very grateful (myself included)! It would also be good publicity for the game developers.
These sort of requests seem to spring from a fundamental misunderstanding of how the games market works. I’m afraid there simply is no ever lasting wellspring of steam keys into which you’d only have to dip your goblet to obtain all the keys you’d ever want and the only reason anyone ever limits anything is to be stingy about it. Chrono.gg can’t give away keys they don’t have.
The only reason there are keys in the coin shop at all is either because Chrono.gg bought them from developers, possibly at wholesale prices, or that the developers kindly donated them. Either way there’s clearly going to be a very limited stock and the keys that are made available for free to you are the result of good will from everyone involved.
I can’t imagine chrono.gg people emailing the brigador devs demanding they hand over a bunch more keys now, since they got this update coming and all! A major update is one of very few opportunities for a game to see an upswing in sales after it’s release period and every key they give away is a customer not paying them.
I’m sorry if I’m coming off sounding harsh here free games are nice and all, but please do realize what such a thing actually entails.
Oh, I realize all you’ve said. While you’re right about the upswing in sales in such a situation, a certain small promotion (like the Chrono.gg coin shop, for example) could also boost them by word of mouth, people trying the game and recommending it to their friends or enlarging their potential customer base simply by making themselves more visible. As you said yourself, keys in such a promotion are going to be limited, so the small financial loss from that would be more than made up for in publicity/marketing.