you get looked out after too many tries and I think if that happens to often they could take action (like blocking you)
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you need to wait an hour
but as I said if you get looked out too many times, they could investigate further
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Nothing, but considering the possible combinations are in the range of 10^23, even if there are one billion keys in circulation (there aren't, maybe it is a few millions), and even if you wouldn't get a periodic lockout for trying, you'd have to iterate the combinations with a bot for weeks to find one working key for one of the several thousand possible games.
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There are 36^15 possible key combinations.
This is 2 10^23, or 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
If Steam have 100,000 games, and issue 7 billion keys for each game (enough for every person on the planet), this would still only be 7 10^14 keys.
Or 700,000,000,000,000 keys.
So randomly choosing keys, would take you roughly a billion (1,000,000,000) tries to get a single combination right.
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I wish it worked like that too, but Steam can't tell you because people would abuse that knowledge.
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If you already own the game, steam will tell you what the key is for. Go to the redeem key page on the Steam website, open up developer console, and upon entering the key and getting the Game Already Owned message, the steam app id will be visible somewhere in the developer console. I forget exactly how this works because I've not yet needed it myself since I learned of it, but there was a thread about it here on SteamGifts not too long ago.
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You can donate keys to steam.db and they will tell you what game it activated for them. If they already own it the key will not be used up, and you will know what game/package it unlocks, but they will not be able to tell you if the key has been used before.
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So, people could generate random keys, have the website check if it works then activate or sell it themself? :D
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It's annoying, yes, but it also encourages you to be very meticulous about keeping track of what key is for what game. Ignore at your own peril!
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It's because if you buy the game from Valve you get the game, not a key. If you have a key you got it somewhere else which means they didn't get a cut, so they have no financial motivation to help you in any way.
In fact, it would be straight up bad business to identify it for you, since it would make it easier for you to re-sell keys and make the second-hand market more appealing, which means less profit for Valve.
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It is not that straightforward in some cases. For example I had preordered Elite Dangerous on its developer Frontier's webstore. ED wasn't on Steam when it was released and I didn't get a Steam key at the time. Half a year after ED's release they started to sell it on Steam too and anyone who backed/bought the game on Frontier's store have option to get Steam key tied to your Frontier account. But if you generate a Steam key for ED, Valve gets a cut on your future ED releated purchases on Frontier's store. If I buy an ED DLC from Frontier's store Valve would earn more than what would they earn when I would buy the same DLC from Steam.
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Steam should ask for confirmation when activating a key, saying what the key is for and asking if you want to activate it or not, like what Sony does when you activate a code for a pre-paid Playstation card, it says something like "You are about to add XXX $ to your wallet, are you sure?".
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abuse what?
knowing which game a key is from?
if it's valid?
if it's already used?
when was it activated?
if it's revoked?
which company distributed it?
in what platform does it activate?
i don't see any cons on the system (yet).
only a very handy tool to prevent unnecessary obfuscation, and also a way to prevent scamming or in the worst case, solid proof a key was invalid.
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unfortunately, there's no website or service made by valve or made by other developers to link a key to a game.. and most likely there won't ever be, I don't know nothing of computer and informatic things, but for sure Valve won't ever make something like this available.. you already got the reasons I think from the many thorough comments above.. even the suggestion written by jhr76 would be awesome (i.e.: when you write the key, the website asks you "do you really want to activate this key for GAME X?"), but valve doesn't gain anything from it so they are fine with the key system as it is..
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