Developer Says Publisher Praised Game Before Keys Were Ever Activated
The case shows how cheap the verification is for a developer approached cold: the developer could check the keys and see that a review he was told about had not happened.
Reporting from 1 source: Automaton.
An indie developer on r/gamedev says RedDeer.Games offered a Switch publishing deal, then withdrew it three days later and pitched paid porting instead. The developer invalidated the five Steam keys he had sent; none had been activated. He says no testing happened, and that the praise RedDeer quoted back repeated his own questionnaire answers.
The developer posts as SurvivalTaktix and is building Seferia Matrix, a dice-based deck-building roguelite set for Steam on November 10. The offer from RedDeer.Games covered porting, quality assurance, and certification costs, with no advance and a 51 to 49 split in the developer's favor after roughly $10,000 was recouped from eShop revenue.
RedDeer sent the keys to its porting and evaluation team, then returned with praise the developer recognized as his own questionnaire text. The publishing contract was withdrawn, the company citing a full lineup and genre balance, and a fixed-fee porting proposal took its place.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.