Talking about it now that it’s over.
Did you pick up Iron Harvest when it was briefly free yesterday? Because it was. Steam game settings are fickle, and I’m sure there’s a conference call going on between Deep Silver and King Art today that is slightly on the contentious side because of that.
Iron Harvest is a real time strategy game set in an alternate 1920’s with steampunk and big machines. At some point a package got created in Steam’s system called ‘CoreClient CYS Only’. It appears to just contain the first campaign. On June 2 someone accidentally set the parameters to allow anyone with an installation URL to get a complimentary copy.
The app has since been fixed so the URL trick doesn’t work anymore.
So why write this? Well I’ve been seeing all over the internet people afraid that they’re going to get banned or punished for redeeming the game and I just want to give a reassuring note that that’s not going to happen. Valve isn’t going to punish users for a developer accidentally making their game freely available. In fact I’d find it hard to believe Valve would want to intervene to the extent of revoking the free copies that were given out.
Worst case scenario, your copy might be revoked. But since this wasn’t some hack employed and was due to the publisher’s mistake, you have no reason to fear the might fist of Valve.
MMO Fallout 