it is not good at all, as your analogy requires you to give them monies continuously over time for it to work. no such transactions are needed here.

If you want an analogy which fitted better, it would be :

"This more akin to a store employee giving out a kinda cool, moderately-priced electronic doohickey to anyone and everyone who walks by a given chain store in a mall... however, you needed to stay in their store when you tried it the first time to make sure that it worked"

and that's that.

well all I do is get the key and activate it through steam without screwing around with steam in my web browser!

No idea what game this is, but sure, why not since it is free (and because I already have a HB and Steam accounts anyway).

I see it is also on GOG, so yeah I might buy it in some sale later as well. I won't probably even remember I already have it on Steam. :)

Exactly. If they did that I would be a rabid Steam customer and supporter (only for the DRM-free titles, that is). But they don't, and probably won't as you say, so instead I'm/we're forced to rely on third party initiatives to discover which of Steam's games are DRM-free, and have to jump through the little hoop that is SteamCMD. Which is still an inconvenience, and totally a client[*], but is the next best thing to a proper DRM-free download.


[*] "The Steam Console Client or SteamCMD is a command-line version of the Steam client..."

It's totally a client that you can manipulate fully. It's not a game client as people see them and more a terminal program like CuteFTP for accessing specific data.

Of course, that's why I use it extensively. :)

I really wish I knew about this earlier but better late than never.

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[sigh] Gee, ya got me. I long for the good ol' days when people used to be able to surf the Internet without using any software interface at all...
Good to know. I've never seen anybody bring that up before in any of the (thousands of pointless) similar discussions here in the past. It must be REALLY obscure. :)

Nah, it's simply pretty recent. I still remember being laughed at in this forum not long ago when I expressed my surprise at not being able to redeem a Steam key via the website. Looks like I had the last laugh after all, hah! :P

I only know about it because Humble link's directly to it. There's no where in Steam that I can find it...

Too bad Humble didn't let you chose to use it on GOG as well.
But thanks for bringing the freebie to everyone's attention.

Thank you, I wanted to try this game. :)

I've been reluctant to use Steam, I made my account there months ago and added some games to the wishlist, just to keep track of things I wanted that were not on GOG. This is the first game I get there, I'm glad to know I won't need the Steam client to play it as my office computer has no Internet connection.

Well then. Mine disappeared from my Humble Key library before I could redeem it. Submitted a ticket to Humble now. If you got it and didn't redeem, may want to check on that.