I am a moderater of a few customer advocacy/greenlight quality control groups over on Steam.
Yes I know many devs have a dislike for us, but that's is a topic for another day.
We've noticed this sad trend of people claiming to be publishers, promoters, marketers and even boosters. I just want to inform everyone that this is normally a scam.
Reports of them as sketchy to say the least but their methods have all the hallmarks of a con artist.
Some will ask for an upfront payment for their "service" others will pay you to "support" or to "publish" your game when in reality they're either scamming you out of your hard work or asking you to pay for things you can do yourself for free.
I've been looking into this for a while and it's pretty sad what happens to some of these developers, I'm not going to name names. These people will usally spam free keys for giveaways, keys from games they "helped" in the past usally or whatever is cheap on key trading sites. Not to mention the unprofessional behavior many of these "publishers" have, faking reviews (that Valve has been cracking down on lately), trading keys for votes or positive reviews(also against Valve's ToS), attacking anyone leaving negative or constructive feedback and having little to no quality controll.
To be fair there are good legitimate indie publishers out there, it's just many people pretend to be one to make a quick buck off new developers. If someone approaches you offering their services, it's normally better to ignore them as they would of spammed that invite out to every developer they can find in hopes of getting a bite.
I'm posting this on itch.io because I've been informed that a few of these people have moved to suckering devs here.
I'll debug some of their common claims too:
First, it costs nothing to promote your game. Many people cover greenlight and other up-and-coming indie games for free, just be prepared for them to be very critical. Just be carefull, I've heard tales of people asking for keys to cover games only for those keys to end up on key trading sites.
Next, there is zero need to giveaway free game keys to promote your game when a demo will do the job and not cost sales.
You need to consider if your game is even worth selling. Not trying to be mean but, too many games really don't put enough effort in. Those games take up spaces that good games need. It is really hard to get noticed and "Ball Rolling game #3602" and "Lazy Simulator 2017" don't help.