Indie beat ’em up Brok the InvestiGator, which released on Steam this week, wasn’t on my radar until its official Twitter account pointed out something strange about the reviews it received from Steam curators. thread (opens in new tab) In a post on Sunday, developer Cowcat claimed he was targeted by fraudulent curators who wrote fake reviews of the game without having played it.
After watching it, the studio’s reasoning is sound. Of his 150 user reviews on Brok the InvestiGator published at the time of this writing, 99% are positive.As of yesterday morning, the only negative review is Curator on Steam (opens in new tab)For some of these curators, Block is the only negative review the account has ever given out of hundreds of games. It appears to have been written in retaliation to the developers.A day after the Cowcat thread was posted, a negative review by the Brok curators turned into a positive review. Here’s how it all went down.
Ahead of Brok’s release, Cowcat said it received “tons and tons” of requests from Steam curators for review codes. While this is standard practice for legitimate curator pages, streamers, and gaming sites, it does open the door to scammers such as G2A trying to win free Steam codes that can be resold on his marketplace site.
Cowcat wanted to weed out the scammers with a clever workaround. Instead of sending the code for the full game, he sent the code for the free prequel chapter of Brok the InvestiGator. The idea was that legitimate curators would redeem codes, follow up and demand full games, while scammers would unknowingly sell useless codes online. gray market. Cowcat thinks this has gone a little too far. According to the developer, “very few” people are wondering why they were sent the demo code, and “most of these emails ask for those keys in their account before posting the review. It’s from a scammer who didn’t even enable it.”
In that case, these scammers would have to issue a refund after reselling the code, and curator reviews included common criticisms like “broken gameplay” and “unpolished” to get Cowcat back. may have started writingThis is circumstantial evidence, but Reddit user darklinkpower’s analysis (opens in new tab) of the Steam Curator in question. They point out that his nine curators who left negative reviews have some pretty dubious similarities.
- All curators share a common admin user who can control what they post
- All created on the same or nearly the same day
- Similar number of followers (average 23,000)
- All had one or two negative reviews (including Brok the InvestiGator at the time)
Not long after Cowcat and darklinkpower’s posts gained attention, curators edited their negative reviews into positive ones.The same curator who previously said Block was “unpolished in all areas” reveals now i believe (opens in new tab) Brok is a “great cartoon detective adventure” with “fully integrated side-scrolling action mechanics”. Cowcat said he reported the curators in question to Valve.
It seems strange that this practice of revenge review is even possible in theory. Individual Steam users can’t actually publish reviews unless they own and play the game in question, but curator pages don’t have that restriction. This sounds like a loophole that needs to be filled, but Valve doesn’t seem to care as much about curator reviews as it does user reviews. The curator’s review is actually disconnected from the user’s review, and there’s a small link I didn’t notice until today, which doesn’t seem to affect the overall score displayed at the top of the store page.
Here are all the curator reviews of the game: I can see that there are quite a few “doubtful” negative reviews. https://t.co/E2AkLggKWe (1/16) pic.twitter.com/Bu0R1qymvBAugust 28, 2022
Cowcat is similarly skeptical about how much curator reviews ultimately matter, but believes Valve can take steps to mitigate scammers. For one, Cowcat suggests that Valve “stop forcing you to rely on keys and instead open up Curator Connect to do everything.”
Curator Connect is a feature of Steam’s backend that allows developers to submit games directly to trusted Steam Curators. Currently the developer can only send him 100 copies of the game. That, and the fact that curators have no way to request code from developers, limits its usefulness.
I have reached out to Valve for comment. I will update if I get a reply.
