Quick question about CV and free game promotions without keys

Okay, quick side-note, but pricing errors [by strict interpretation of that phrase, and thereby not including related listing misconfigurations] don't exist for the Steam Store or, at least, shouldn't: I recall that they blocked out purchase of -100% pricing a few years back, and then anything higher than -90% later on [to curb trashware discounting]. Thus, the only way to configure a game as free should be to actually configure its listing type as such.

But, regardless of the premise for it, since gift storing is no longer a thing, Steam store promotions can't be exploited. Well, no, I suppose if staff has stopped blocking out / deleting giveaway listings during the free promotion, then it's possible, but that seemed a silly enough change [to my perspectives] that I hadn't seriously considered it till this moment. It could however be that they have it set as free as a stop-gap until they have time to update the listings, though, so that's another possibility.

But anyway, the justification for it being free-listed aside, I'm not sure whether what you're discussing is related. The timing means the list addition was based on the developer's intentional free promotion. As I noted above, there shouldn't be any pricing error elements involved and, regardless, it still shouldn't relate to the present issue even if there were.

Even if something did somehow manage to set the game temporarily to 0P [say, by the game being temporarily delisted, or by the promotion somehow being configured similar to a Free Weekend], that's not really relevant to the long-term CV aspect, which is tied to the game being on the free list. As far as that aspect goes, there really shouldn't be any difference as to whether the underlying basis was a price error or an intentional promotion.