You know, I actually put some thoughts to whether I should post this here or not, and I am so, so sorry to tell you this, but this search of yours is never going to bear any fruit. I was playing dumb and pretending to not know about this stuff actually. I was in the search all along with 4 other experienced people I know and we just decided to give up. Now let me tell you why we gave up eventually.
And before everything, I must disclose that it is not within my intention to personally attack you or humiliate you, so please don’t take this personal. And to moderators, please take the time to read the entire post of mine and notify me about the changes I should make before doing anything to it, because it is all very informational for everyone who’s interested. If anyone here is not particularly interested in this whole explanation, but still want to know what I’m speaking about, you can skip to the TLDR part.
First. Gifts.
Steam gifts are absolutely out of the question. Steam revised their gifting system almost a decade ago. Nobody can store their purchases as gifts unless some very specific examples which Disruptor Pack is not a part of. Nowadays it goes only one way and if the recipient refuses it, the system automatically refunds it and you can not change its recipient once you buy the gift. Therefore, It is completely impossible to obtain the pack as a gift now. This is all publicly disclosed by Valve. There is no gift anymore, and if there is, it’s not meant for us. They all have their set owners already. That’s how Steam’s system is built.
About Steam Gifts, by Valve.
Second. Keys.
@Swangtheugly missed about the crucial detail about the keys. The Disruptor Pack was never sold as a Steam key to public. Not Humble Bundle, not Green Man Gaming, never. You can factcheck this by browsing various game deal comparison sites. These sites are set up to automatically grab all price data from all known sites, and there is no record of keys ever being sold through legitimate retailers. The keys were exclusively provided for the streamers and influencers via services like Keymailer. They receive the contents for free because they are part of IOI’s marketing campaign. In exchange, they must produce contents featuring the freely received content on YouTube. For that reason, vast majority of them are gone, already activated.
But. There’s always some people who plays the system. They are repeat offenders, applying for every marketing campaign known to mankind to leech the keys and make a profit out of them. As a result, very small fraction of keys are resold, and they try to exhaust their inventory ASAP. The reason for this is because the value of keys depreciates over time. Hypes die. Demands go down. Discounts happen. Some people will buy those resold keys, and the already extremely small supply is dwindling fast. This happened all well before the delisting for the duration of 6 months. At the time of the delisting all keys got sold off already. IOI is deleting all mentions about The Disruptor left and right. And in IOI’s hands, there’s one useful tool provided by Valve, which allows them to make all unactivated keys useless.
Yes. They have a kill switch for this. IOI can check how many keys are activated and not. And make them unusable at any time. Steam provides it to developers and publishers by default. Again, it is all well explained by Valve. And IOI had all the reason to deploy this tool as early as in September when The Drop Pack launched . Think about this. Imagine yourself as IOI. You give away free keys, expecting them to advertise your products. It’s been 3 months and you’re ready to unveil your next product. But there are still some unactivated keys for your previous product, they did nothing for your marketing, sitting on your freely provided goods. It is so obviously clear they’re not keeping their end of the bargain. So what do you do? Deauthorize, Deactivate. It is only logical for them to use this tool.
About Steam Keys, by Valve.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
But let’s get very optimistic, assuming IOI didn’t use the tool, at all.
The first place whoever owns the key is likely to go at this point is trading sites. And in every trading site, there’s no one, not a single one putting this DLC in auction or an open trade. Across websites, there’s historically only two or three trades involving The Disruptor Pack. Happened all before the delisting. I’ve been monitoring every one of them. Let me give you an example of one site, you registered around last week. But that site is soon to be downgraded to just plain online database without the trading part. Users were abandoning the site weeks before. Number of registered users who owned the disruptor pack was originally around 30 there, when we first checked. Every time when the new owner was added, we contacted them and asked them about it. Every one had someone who bought it for them as gifts. They simply redeemed it later, after the delisting. Not single one hint about remaining keys. The site showed only 6 total owners when you joined. If we were to use these numbers as a metric it means you only joined the website after 80% of people left. I don’t mean to insult you, I can’t stress this enough, but you acted too slow. Even we were not the first to contact these guys. But let’s move onto the next one.
Private groups. They are relatively closed shut communities of Steam, Discord and Telegram, only allowing its members to participate in the discussion and trading. They gatekeep their community to combat scammers, only allowing people with certain number of owned games or levels to reduce the risk factor for its members. You own only 160 games on Steam. not enough. They have thousands, tens of thousands of games. Some of them hire people to level up their Steam accounts and buy everything, I am not joking. They buy and sell now unavailable decade old Football Manager games and character palette swap DLC of long forgotten fighting game for $1,000 and more. They collect the developer builds of games and games that were never sold. Some of them have Concord in their accounts. Sony forcibly reversed all purchases and removed every legitimately bought copy from Steam for that game. That includes keys and gifts. And some of them still have the game. How? Developer codes. Connections. When they say “my uncle works at Nintendo” you might as well believe their words. They are well connected and loaded with disposable income. Peasants like us are not beating them in their game. If there still is a key in their hands, it is beyond our reach. At this point it is safe to say the keys are no longer an option.
Third. Family sharing.
It may work. But Valve implemented a household rule because of rampant abuse recently meaning whoever is willing to share their library should be someone who’s from your country and your region. Unless you personally know someone, family sharing is likely not going to work for you so this option also goes out of window. Note that the abusing the family sharing option with who’s not your family is a violation of Steam’s conducts and your account can be banned for this.
Okay. Let’s clear up. TLDR.
So in order for you to get the key:
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IOI must not have used the tool in their disposal to deactivate all unactivated keys despite them wiping out every possible clues of this DLC which strongly suggests they took the other option,
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There must be someone with their key after all this time,
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You have to somehow make contact with this person fast enough against multiple individuals way well connected and way well informed than you in the search,
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You must somehow convince this person to trade with you over others despite you having no previous trade history, reputation and weaker stats,
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And at the same time you must outbid everyone because this person you’re talking to is no way immediately biting your first offer unless you’re offering them multiple bars of North Korean gold stolen from Milton-Fitzpatrick delivered to you by our beloved bald assassin himself.
I am sorry, but there’s no chance. You’ve been repeating this phrase everywhere. “Looking for the solution, guys”. Expecting someone in your dreams to just contact you with a magical solution. But they’re not IOI. None of those guys are. They cannot give you any solution. The only potential solution is in IOI’s hands, they’re the only ones who can handle this issue. You heard what the developers of Peacock project said to you in their Discord. Even they’re not adding it back. Gifts are gone, keys are gone. Want more examples? Try to find the keys for The Drop Pack. Surely they’ll be more easier to find since it’s still here? No. There’ll be none. Why? Because of the reasons I said above. It was never sold as a key unlike other older DLCs. Yes. It is indeed very frustrating for us non-owners. You know I feel the same way as you because I’ve been very vocal about the removal around here. I am just going to flat out admit, I only joined this community to vent my aforementioned frustration. And I would like to apologize to anyone who felt uncomfortable by my comments. I did try to mostly talk about the topic of removal itself, I never intended to make anyone feel upset. But really, voicing your opinion like me is all you can do at this point.
Unfortunately the most likely outcome for you is, you’re going to be scammed out of your money because user-to-user trades are all trust based. Scammers are going to approach you falsely claiming that they own the key and expect you to shoot $500 to their bank account using PayPal friends and family option because that way, you can’t claim anything back. And no, there’s no way to tell their lies. You can’t prove them wrong. So called proof is faked all the time through photoshop and element inspector. Middlemen? They’re in kahoots with the scammers. I’ve seen it too many times, desperate people getting scammed in cases such as this. This is why I claimed that this post has no real purpose. Because the possibility is nonexistent. You can bump your Steam threads all you want but we lost the chance. The first few days since it got delisted, maybe. But now? It’s almost a month. The ship is already sailed. It is over.
Additionally:
EGS players actually had few extra days to buy the DLC, due to its fundamental difference from Steam. EGS’s client is more clientsided, more local. EGS’s wishlist feature saves and uses its local cache data and people can buy freshly delisted games by going straight to their wishlist and buying the game there. Unless the client randomly decided to refresh the cache and fetch updated information from the servers, that is. And Xbox codes doesn’t exist, at all. Sorry @Grim47. We have no chance either.
That’s final. I have no more detail to add. Patte, I’m sorry if you felt I was too harsh with this reply, but this is my genuine advice to you. There’s no chance. To everyone who took the time to read my wall of text, thanks for tuning in to my TED talk. I know I spoke too much this time, and I apologize for that. Thank you.
If i can i’ll help others find one too!
