[2020] PSA: On Key Reselling

Hey there Reddit. We wanted to reach out to our community about something troubling we've been seeing over the last little while. Over the last several weeks, we've noticed an influx of new players who purchased keys for the Closed Alpha from backers who had extras, or who decided they were no longer interested in the game. We would like to strongly caution users from doing so, as this will only get you access to the Closed Alpha, not the actual release of Dead Matter.

Like many games, Dead Matter is using a separate 'product' on Steam for our Closed Alpha. As a backer reward for some tiers, we offered extra keys with CA-only access to the game so that backers could bring their friends on to play with them and help with the testing program as we worked towards the Early Access release of the game. As such, keeping the CA and main branches of the games separate was necessary - given that quite a few users have a large number of spare keys on their accounts, it's not really practical for us to selectively deactivate keys, so this allows us to easily run the CA, and then provide EA keys to those who purchased them down the line.

As a side-effect of this, however, users who purchased a CA key from one of our backers is only getting access to the Closed Alpha of the game. Once the CA ends, it will no longer be accessible, and only those that have keys for the EA launch will have access to the full release of the game. As such, anybody who purchases a key for Dead Matter at this time from a third party reseller will only be getting access to the CA, while the seller will retain access to the EA release when it goes live as the key will be tied to their account, not yours.

As always, we urge caution when purchasing from third-party storefronts, and strongly recommend against it if at all possible. We've received a number of reports of users that have been outright scammed by sellers claiming to have a key and then providing nothing when paid, and don't want this to happen to anybody if at all possible.

Finally, as many of you have noticed, we've been fairly publically quiet since the start of the CA. There's been a lot of work ongoing with the game, and our focus currently is on fixing up many of our most critical issues. Once that's all sorted out, we'll begin a more formal public update scheme once again. We don't have a solid timeline for this, but we'd like to start providing public updates as soon as reasonably possible. Once we know more, we'll update everybody.