@kalimha (quote isn't working right now... go figure...)
Yes, there are people I'm pretty certain are abusing the system to get to those high levels.
First, let's tackle the notion that they are giving away "
their good games", shall we?
Just look at the giveaways section a little, (especially if you sort by price, so that, say, all the 10 and 8 IC versions of Enforcer are put next to each other in a wall of 100 straight giveaways of the same game) and you notice that giveaways are divided into two types of games: The people giving away a random extra copy of a game they already had, which is what the giveaway section was made for, and which you will never, ever win, and then there are the floods of 200 copies of the same half-dozen games over and over.
This second type of giveaway are a parasite that is perverting the intent of the giveaway system, because it basically turns IndieGala into a laundering site for some of the most scummy practices occurring in Steam's seedy underbelly. Some games flood the giveaways section because they're part of legitimate bundles, but these games are actually much rarer than the ones that are being given away in bulk, and often by the same few names repeated over and over... These games like Enforcer and EivlMaze and so on have never been in a bundle, so where are all these free-floating keys coming from?...
Not every Steam key is a legitimate one by any stretch. IndieGala sells legitimate keys given directly to IndieGala from the developer and Valve, but it's easily possible to gain plenty of keys of dubious authenticity through simply lying to gullible publishers repeatedly through multiple shell email accounts.
Take, for instance, the flood of "Evil Maze" games on the giveaways section; The developer is apparently a really sensitive type who relies upon Google Translate to read and write in English. After getting negative reviews, his response was, (to paraphrase to correct for grammar) "Don't believe the negative reviews. If you don't believe the game is good, just write me, and I'll give free review copies to anyone!" Basically, the developer is openly just giving away free games to literally any email account that mails him.
(And that's not counting times when the developers or "advertisers", themselves, aren't giving away free games as bribes to influence player behavior. Places like Gleam.io allow you to get some games for free in exchange for upvoting other games they are paid to promote.
Take Jim Sterling's examination of YOLO Army as an example of what kind of chicanery creates the bulk of the games landing in the giveaways section.)
So, then, you can see how it would be easy to artificially inflate your score by simply giving away 100 games you don't want, but could easily get for free, right?
Well, then, let's go on to stage 2 of the master plan... When you see a ton of games getting flooded into the giveaways section, if you look at WHO is giving those games away, you'll start to notice a pattern: They're all the same 2-5 people giving away dozens of copies of the same game at the same time. Look at their pages, and all but maybe one will have the same relatively recent sign-up date for someone with such a large positive score of giveaways, and will suspiciously have zero trades or other activity on IndieGala.
See, sockpuppets were always easy to make on IndieGala, but there was little reason to make them until giveaways came along. There's no point in a sockpuppet for trading unless you are a scammer trying to artificially give yourself a bit of positive reviews to make yourself seem legit. With giveaways, however, every
username that enters gets an equal chance to win.
The supposed thing stopping every random yahoo from setting up 100 accounts to flood every giveaway was to create these giver levels, so that you had to actually bring something to the table to get access to all the games... but if you can artificially inflate your score by getting tons of free games, and then giving them away like crazy, then that's no real impediment, now is it?
In fact, if someone was hypothetically prolific enough to manage to get a ton of sockpuppets up to a higher level than anyone else, they could actually just pass fake game codes back and forth between each other. If you make 1-day giveaways of one of those 20,000 point/200 IC entry programming software suites only available to user levels so high that only your own sockpuppets can enter, then you can simply ensure that your own sockpuppet wins and gives you positive feedback for your fake game, while dramatically inflating the user scores on their myriad sockpuppet accounts. Having done this, provided the admin doesn't step in with the banhammer, you've basically future-proofed your sockpuppets against any gradual increase in average userlevels.
So yes, while it's not entirely system-breaking what they're doing, there is clearly something fishy going on, and if the giveaways section becomes flooded with crap games nobody wants but are given away for free or close enough to it, like, say, everything made by Digital Homicide (oh, wait, that's already happened...) and nobody who isn't cheating has any real chance of winning anything worth winning because sockpuppeteers artificially give themselves 50 times the chance to win (oh, wait, that's already happened...) and the site slows to a crawl because of all the constant sockpuppet script traffic, then people won't want to use the site anymore...
Basically, at this point, however, it looks like a tipping point might be reached. Enough parasites can ultimately kill the host, and in the case of IndieGala's giveaways, if there are nothing but bulk garbage game or illegitimate key giveaways, and nothing of actual value you can ever win, it can kill the whole reason to use the service. What's the point in trying to up your rank enough to qualify for giveaways of games you could get for free through the other illegitimate means you clearly possess access to in order to have raised your rank that high, already?
