Unless they are close blood relatives or married, or have a very nice contract about the foundation of a shared company that holds up before international law, it is technically money laundering, tax evasion, and maybe another 3-4 financial criminal activity a prosecutor with some imagination could come up with. Especially since half of the US is now actively hunting any Russians with suspicious activity (and the other half is waiting to get bribed by them :P).

And yet, it has a better single-player story mode than Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII. :3

"The broader conversation about Steam's content policies is one that we'll be addressing soon," the rep said. That's a conversation that's long overdue—and one that I hope Steam users will have the opportunity to take part in.

Translation from Valve to English:
"We will replace the Steam Direct service with a platform where users can take control of the upcoming games list when it comes to independent developers. A platform where they can voice their opinion. A place where they can greenl… open the door for these aspiring enthusiasts.
Who must still pay the non-refundable 100-dollar fee per game, of course."

Just a heads-up, you can directly link a change entry for a game if you link the date part of the box (it holds the permalink): https://steamdb.info/app/383970/history/?changeid=4003177

Also, reposting this on SteamGifts, so the original buyers can know. Don't have a reddit account to tell them there. Exposure helps. :)

If only all of these devs/publishers were so easy to get rid of. Not just from Steam, the real cesspool is the mobile market.

No. Only the developer/publisher who originally generated the key (and Valve itself) can check on the activated status. This helps to keep the grey market at bay a little more, keys always carry a risk without the licensed store guarantee.
(Plus technically I think it is sensitive business data, seeing how many keys you know of are activated or not.)

At least he could register another email address instead of using the same mail.ru one, and just forward all traffic to one box. Many others realised this simple trick to mask alt accounting ages ago.

If you run into a duplicate key, Steam offers you to send an email to the account that activated it. It is there because Valve knows very much that there are plenty of users with tons of alt accounts, and it is easy to forget where you activated what.

So someone was just trying the same key and pressed that button. It happens frequently with key drops, especially with newb/noob Steam users who don't know what this feature is and think Steam will send them a working key.

Well, let's just say that an engine switch-out is not always popular. One of the most popular twin-stick indie shooters ever, Crimsonland at one point switched from a 2D engine to a 3D engine, and they also rebalanced the game modes. Fans of the game are still regularly asking for installers of the last 2D version before the change, because they don't like the new engine (which indeed behaves differently).

Similar with Painkiller: Hell and Damnation, which is nothing more but putting the old game to an Unreal engine, while also keeping everything intact. It is… I guess the most diplomatic way to put it is that if you never played the original, HD is a decent game, but if you know how the vanilla Painkiller played, it is a very pale comparison, despite the mechanics really remaining the same.

Not saying that this random shovelware here will have rabid legions demanding the RPGMaker engine, just mentioning that an extensive change like that can result in something many would consider a different game altogether.

But it is obviously not the same game. I mean, look at the profile picture, one has just a boat, the other has a boat with a sail and a not-photoshopped "4 PC" text that is not written in Comic Sans.
Not to mention that the store descriptions are utterly different.

No, but seriously, this really is a re-release. The old one was made on the RPGMaker engine, this new one is one some mobile game engine. Engine ports are traditionally handled as different games, even if the content is the same. Happened with Painkiller (remade it on the Unreal engine, and managed to somehow make a great game suck with it), Metro 2033 (the Redux versions were just engine updates, albeit they let the game finally be played on machines not powered by a nuclear power plant) and when Skyrium did it, the internet went crazy to get the exact same game, but now with god rays at some spots on the map.