How original.
I swear these guys are doing a competition on which asset will be posted more on Steam: Hammer 2 or UnitZ.

So far is is more like "dev", unless new players suddenly popped up. I hope it gets to international news. =)

Well, one look at its Steam item store kinda tells me everything that has to be known about this… thing. ^.^

*shrugs* To be honest, I do not think I have heard about many F2P MMO/MP-only games that were not P2W-ish. Paladins before a large update and Warframe, maybe.

Self-updaters and separate launchers are commonplace on MMO-like games, but creating them as an auto-starting executable is not. Some software still does that to this day, but generally this is hardly something that encourages people.

As for your current issue, seems to be doing what it claims to do, but, well, it is up to you how much you trust an auto-starting executable coming from Russia attached to a game that has an in-game store that uses your payment data. :)

Originally posted by IFIYGD:

Sure. So Salz can find you easily, and pester you for 1000 keys so he can "promote" your game?

Salz uses mostly emails in the first place. As I said, you can easily get the email from Steam itself, anyone can do it since it is a public contact information. Anyone who publishes a game on Steam must give a public contact point. You cannot avoid that, although some devs try interesting methods, like a Twitter account or a Vkontakte page.

As for the private profile, it is general consensus. This is why you see many people flat-out posting on their profile that level 0 friend requests are automatically ignored or blocked, why groups post public profile or level 5+ as a general requirement, why trading sites refuse to acknowledge registration if your profile (and in that case, inventory) is not set to public, and why it is generally a lot more difficult to get any kind of answer to a question on the forums when someone is marked as level 0 (private profile).

This has been like that for years now. Nearly a decade, actually. Steam is probably the only place where it is this strong, but this resulted in that even those who generally like hidden/invisible/private profiles anywhere else keep their Steam one open, so they can avoid complications when interacting with the community.
When people just play games (and not in multiplayer) and don't do anything more on Steam, this is not even an issue since they cannot meet the part of Steam that scoffs at private profiles.

While what you are stating is true, most indie devs have to give an email address as a contact point, and anyone can get that from the game's support page, so a private profile is largely meaningless to filter out beggars, it just drops the friend request spam down, but not the email one.
Whether that small recluse is worth it can be contested, since private profiles on Steam (and interestingly mostly only on Steam) indicate that the user is trying to hide something and causes distrust. It is usually better to have a semi-open profile with comments disabled or set to friends-only.

Join those who are constantly try to pressure Valve to get off of their lazy asses and implement a star rating system where leaving a text review is not mandatory. At least it gives normal feedback.

If you want actual text review so people can learn about the game in more detail, Steam has the curator system for this purpose. You can send keys through it to curators, and this system pretty much has the "if you accept the key, you review the game" clause integrated into it.

Problem is, naturally, finding good curators. There is always the easy method, contacting Salz and his Original Group network, where they gladly leave a fake generic positive review, since they are dealing in this. The not easy one is looking for groups that center around the genre of your game, large curators that seem trustworthy, and so on.

One group where you may try to look around is the Reviewer's Guild. It is a closed group since it tries to hand-pick reviewers based on their existing portfolio, but you can contact the admins hopefully to ask for pointers.
This can have a drawback too, though. The review can be honest. Very honest. I received only one game in a similar fashion (before the curator system was implemented), and I gave it an honest review. Of a downvote and a 30%-ish score. And it is still the highest-rated review on the top of its store page. So sometimes getting what you asked for can fire back badly.

It is not about them withering, it is them ending up in the store in the first place.
But, of course, each of them mean a 100-dollar posting fee, which explains the whole "we allow everything…" attitude, where they forgot to write down the continuation of the sentence: "…since it brings us free money no matter what!"

"More players to interact with it."
Despite how Valve said they limited the number of keys these one-time asset-flipping "companies" can generate, I still see plenty of them appearing in bundles and promotions, so this algorithm will still be beaten if enough people pretend to run it. There are software for that. Tell Salz or any of the shady "promoters" to ask their moronic legions to idle the game for an hour and you are set.
Which does not differ in any way from what is currently happening, so all Valve did was patting themselves on the back for avoiding doing real work yet again and still get some praise for it.