Why am I not surprised? Steam is a long-time shithole since they started with Steam Greenlight and unsavory characters founded groups with membership counts in the thousands who blackmailed developers. Since everybody and their dog can publish a "game" on Steam now if they pay 100 bucks it's no wonder the shark tank got even crazier.
From my perspective those people desperate to make a quick buck aren't the problem but Valve/Steam who are partner in crime.
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people desperate to make a quick buck aren't the problem
Yes, they are. And we should not twist the reality to accommodate them. That kind of opinion only enables the thinking of "Not my fault the system can be gamed". Same as saying "not my fault I didn't pay taxes, the system has holes in it, its their fault I don't do that".
While Steam has obvious issues with quality control which they should fix, we should see these scum as what they are - useless lowlife scammers. Not some desperate guys making a quick buck.
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never trust positive reviews of anything!!!!!!!!!!!
always go off the negative. you need to find the right reviews tho cause some people are just crazy
once they start paying people to make good quality negative reviews were all fucked
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Very true, I do that when shopping off Amazon.
You can also make out if the user reviews are emotional or rational. Seeing the cons first, helps u assess the positive reviews better as well.
Also another check for steam, if im really interested in a game I check the HLTB numbers, seeing the gameplay time of the reviewers subconsiously also helps a lot. Some reviews gladly shit lengthy on games after 1 or 2 hrs of play!
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Some reviews gladly shit lengthy on games after 1 or 2 hrs of play!
Some games can have a lot of content but still be bad enough that you figure out it isn't worth recommending after only an hour or two. Also, don't forget that Steam won't let you refund a game after 2 hours, and it doesn't count offline play in your total hours spent. I beat Final Fantasy: Type-0, but Steam glitched and said I only spent 8 minutes on it.
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The fake product reviews on Amazon are a real problem, that is why there are websites like reviewmeta.com or browser extensions like Fakespot.
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for Amazon I find it best to read some of every starred review.
... sometimes its the 5 review that makes you not buy it... I was looking at wrist blood pressure cuffs... one of the 5 reviews mentioned it was inaccurate ... for something of this nature that is completely unacceptable.
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Well I hope we'll get another ban wave from Valve, although it's probably gonna be a drop in the ocean in the end.
What's kinda puzzling is that the website where this seems to operate from pays in rubles yet everything's written in English, and there's no Russian text to be found in the article outside of the Telegram screenshots?
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Hi Melusca!
The website is in fact in Russian, we just used Google Translate on the web page. This was not done for the Telegram message though as this was not available on the phone it was screenshotted with.
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Probably google translate. I opened the website and if you don't get the url bar in it doesn't show that it's being translated but it's all in English.
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It isn't too hard to get a sense that a game has a bunch of fake reviews. Sometimes you look at an indie game's page, a game that has no marketing and isn't particularly noteworthy for any reason, and it has a bunch of positive reviews, all of them about the same length, with users' playtimes all roughly the same, and none of them mention any of the game's flaws. Often the developer will write responses to negative reviews. And when you look at the forum, there's usually people complaining about some blatant problem the game has.
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What do they really get from fake positive reviews? Because if what they are looking for is to improve sales, as soon as the buyer tries the game and discovers that it is bad or that it has errors, they will ask for a refund. :/
This is just sad.
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If the game isn't bad, should we consider those reviews "fake"?
I mean, certainly paying for reviews is not very honest, but at least they are not lying about the product.
Isn't this comparable to the reviews that some curators make after receiving free copies of some games?
By this I do not mean that all curators are dishonest. But surely there are those who are, and the motivation is similar.
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Yes they're fake, because as was shown in the article, these reviewers don't play the games. They use idling software to up the hours, so the contents and reasoning behind them are false and disingenuous.
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What they are really getting is exposure. The Steam algorithm won't promote games under 10 reviews. It can be seen on the store page with the message "Need more user reviews to generate a score". You can also google many examples why these first 10 reviews are important.
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This is also very important, some developers do this out of desperation, and because Valve hasn't cracked down on this behaviour enough developers also look at everyone else doing it and think "I can get away with doing this too"
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Since there are thousands of games on Steam, it essentially became a second Steam Direct fee. On top of paying $100, a developer now has to pass the second requirement of 10 reviews with direct purchases to give the game a fighting chance and not get filtered into oblivion.
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FINALLY I GET IT!
I was watching all these 50p fake games, and they all had 10 reviews clearly fake. Many times 10 positives or 9 positives and one negative. It was driving me crazy why always had to be 10.
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Those games are doing another trick. They release the game at the minimum price, get the paid reviews, increase the price to 50+€, now noone can put negative reviews. Then they can generate keys to sell these games as high value (inflated base price) and positive reviews (the bought ones).
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You can't refund a game if they buy it on an external site, based on Steam reviews.
Also heard that there are people selling "random game packs" on Ebay and similar places, with a guaranteed game worth $X and having Y% positive review rate. Setting super high price solves the first problem, having fake reviews sorts out the second, so they can just throw in that trash as a special extra.
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That's not what happens. Usually people buy games and then never touch them. Yes. That's how it works. So they never refund them either. Even if some people actually play the game they bought for an hour or two and they consider it bad, refunds still rarely happen. People are just that lazy. It's small minority that actually plays all their games and refunds whenever they dislike something strongly. So I guess that's why positive fake reviews work very well for them, even on steam and amazon, where refunding would be no problem.
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Thanks for posting this Mellow. As always, I appreciate the time and effort you and the rest of the group does investigating and reporting things.
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It was pretty obvious that this was going on with a lot of the shovelware, thanks for the investigative journalism pointing out how. If a game has less than 20 reviews, a positive score doesn't mean much.
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Yeah, we started to notice these reviews a few years ago. Wanted to talk about them for ages, but a lot of what we had was just circumstantial rather than anything concrete, until now of course.
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Awesome investigation !
I really hope this makes things better, ot at least makes steam react.
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I just wanted to post this :)
Keep fighting the good fight! What you're doing is valuable.
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Interesting. I think we all knew that cheap games often have fake reviews, but it's nice to actually know one of the sources. I never heard of that Mipped forum before, so I'll probably do some reading there.
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This is very, very interesting. Thank you for sharing!
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Seems like too much effort to go through just to add a +1 to your steam library. If these were halfway decent games, I could understand going through the trouble of leaving fake reviews.. but they look like shit. Just seems like a waste of time, why bother
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In most cases it's more than just a +1, people do get paid ontop of the original buying price.
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If they're getting paid less than a dollar per review, but manage to create thousands of reviews, then I suppose what matters most is how long it takes to make the review.
This reminds me of when companies offered money/giftcards if you bought their products from Amazon and posted a review. Ultimately what Amazon did to combat that was to ban the company from selling on Amazon, so it wouldn't surprise me if Valve takes a similar approach if they catch on
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Well done! Too bad you didn't have someone on your team to inspect or automate the applications to get the names of all games. Thanks for sharing!
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Oof. This is why I always look for negative reviews, even if I disagree I know they'll be more honest (or obvious trolls).
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Appreciate the journalism work with this. Although I have my doubts valve will do anything, its still good to be aware of stuff like this
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This has been going on since reviews were a thing. even before the internet.
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Given the four examples we have only one candidate with a positive rating, a F2P game. The others are all mixed.
It's logical that people attempt to cheat, so that's hardly new. But the results we were shown suggest that the damage isn't mentionable. Either the quantity is a drop in the ocean of valid reviews and/or Steam is already doing a good job of filtering such suspicious reviews. And frankly, it can't be that difficult to notice accounts flooding the system with reviews.
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And frankly, it can't be that difficult to notice accounts flooding the system with reviews.
That's how we know they don't care. They know. They are not doing anything about it. Why would they really?
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Just that they do care, otherwise they wouldn't have introduced countermeasures such as only counting reviews that result directly from Steam purchases and not those from key activations.
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You seem to only be looking at recent reviews rather than the overall scores highlighted. games like Skibidi Backrooms, Monsters Domain and !Anyway! are only marginally within their aggregations (Skibidi and Anyway almost being in mixed, and Monsters Domain almost in mostly negative) probably being propped up by the fake reviews.
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My point is that none of these games reach a quality level in their reviews that would make the average person even think about buying them. So sure, it's an issue regarding money laundering. But it's way too irrelevant to be an issue for Steam customers in general.
And my other point above was solely about his claim that Steam doesn't bother at all, which isn't true. Who knows, maybe Steam already chose countermeasures that aren't obvious to us. I probably would shadow-ban mass reviewers. Simple to implement and quite effective.
Anyways, at least when it should really become a general concern and people would be misguided in their purchases, resulting in massive refund waves, they'd have to take action. But I don't see us anywhere close to that point.
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There are many people still buying and playing bad games, for whatever reason.
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When you fInd out the article of Sentinels of the store mention specifically three users that do fake reviews. And those three users belong to Steamgifts.............
Strong congratulations to Sentinels of the store and MellowOnline1 for their investigative journalism.
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Was it because of the article or was it an older suspension?
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Unfortunately i don't really know. Last logon date is 1 month ago, but that does not mean anything.
I'd assume this is older.
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I really don't like suspended users, to be honest. But I like people that give fake reviews, breaking the steam experience for the rest of us even less.
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Ofc Steam hasn't answered yet.What are they going to say? "We are already aware and tbh as long as our legal dpt tells us we are in no legal danger, and we're making a buck and a half of these, who cares"?
One of these days Valve is going to get indicted in a Russian mob money laundering takedown and we'll lose all our games.
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I mean, they are already doing that for American companies too anyways...
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This is disappointing, particularly the fact that Steam chose to remain silent regarding the issue. If we cannot trust reviews, how are we to tell good indie games from bad ones?
Still, great job on the investigative journalism piece! It's better to know about a problem and find ways to fix it or work around it then not know and suffer the consequences.
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I assumed something like this had to be going on since there's a lot of suspicious reviews floating around, still, I'm kinda surprised that they have such an elaborate system in place and the level of security measures is downright impressive. These guys did a good job documenting the inner workings of this network, let's see if valve does anything about it.
Now, the thing is that I struggle to see how this problem can be successfully solved, it feels like any measure taken is gonna turn into a cat and mouse situation where new holes in the system are always found. Maybe valve should offer bounties on fake reviews/reviewers, but that will turn into a witch hunt in no time... maybe some reputation system where a user needs to earn their place as a reviewer... nah, that'll turn into a popularity contest.
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Yeah, we were discussing this earlier in fact, I feel it would be appropriate for Valve to ban the developers that have employed this tactic and also possibly place restrictions on users who are established to be associated with the scheme. It would be a struggle to permanently plug the hole, but I feel there are some short term solutions for sure to mitigate it.
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Ban developers that do that. Block users that give fake reviews, not allowing to buy any other game ever again. That would make bad apples to think it twice.
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That is a valid approach, but it only works for the most blatant stuff, I imagine some of these operations are run with more subtlety in order to be harder to prove. And in case that everyone currently doing this shit is just as dumb as this case and leaving a bunch of unquestionable proof behind, then the ones that come later down the line will have to learn to be more subtle to survive.
I feel like there has to be some sort of way to address this that attacks the root of the problem and removes the incentive to even attempt these schemes.
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Don't we have proof of at least five games already, according to the investigation? And three users. Do that a few more times, and we can keep having more developers. Keep banning them. And block users from buying anything else. It would royally puss off people they can't buy new games with their main
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I mean, it might work. We'll have to see if valve does something with this report.
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A reputation system wouldn't work. Basically no community driven system would work. Because it would only increase the size of the pyramid. Instead of faking the reviews directly, they would first fake the reputation of the reviewers and then fake the reviews.
If you want to have "trusted" reviewers, they would have to be applied by a neutral party. Valve could do it themselves but then people will start complaining why person x is chosen but not they themselves. Aside from the immense workload, it is not a socially feasible system.
You could go a "SG like" system that in order to be "eligible" for reviews you have to spent at least x money on Steam directly, for example 100 €. And not only having games with a value of 100 € but having actually paid that amount. So if you bough at sale it will only count the sales price. That would make review faking at least expensive and make bans more of a threat. Because right now, fake reviewers getting banned is not an issue as you can easily make new accounts. Though this method would also remove a large chunk of normal users without malicious intent so it isn't feasible either.
Technically, Valve has already "adressed" this system with a community driven approach. It is basically the curation system which tells you, ignore the whole review system and just chose a few people you actually trust. It works to a certain degree. Though, you first have to find a curator with a similar taste and have to hope he keeps doing the job. Also, the curator sites are not exactly friendly to navigate. If you follow someone it is not an issue. But if you join later and want to take a look at what has been curated, it is rather impractical.
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Overall the review section has been in a bad state for a long while, and Steam doesn't do anything
From bots farming Steam Awards like Clown, "I'm a 40 years old" comments, ASCII, hard to find an honest review there
I just watch a youtube gameplay, or look for a post in Reddit about the game
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I see people keep saying that Valve won't do anything about this.. but Valve has already taken measures against stupid tactics by devs in the past.. so why not this lol.
The whole reason people are buying the games (and later compensated by the dev) is to circumvent the system valve put in place to invalidate steam key reviews toward the overall score. Plus, games with a low amount of reviews won't count toward the game count number on your profile. Also, they've made it so that they're far more strict on giving out several thousands of keys for games that lack enough reviews/sold copies on steam. I believe Valve will most certainly take action against it, because they already have several times in the past with other similar things.
I think the issue here is I'm not entirely sure if they'll detect it using an algorithm or if it needs to manually done. I've been using steam for nearly 2 decades and even I didn't know that this was going on in mass scale, so it's also possible that Valve wasn't aware that sites like that existed. No company is perfect at monitoring things like that. I believe the easiest solution is to ban the devs like Amazon did a few years ago when they had a similar issue with companies using money and free gift cards to bait consumers into posting reviews. People that have made thousands of fake reviews will probably have their account restricted as well.
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I mean paid reviews are not exclusive to Steam. They're all over Amazon and similar websites as well.
But they all share one thing in common: It's always products (In this case games), I would've never bought in the first place anyways.
So.. meh.
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Sentinels of the Store have uncovered a fake review website that appears to be the epicenter of thousands of fake positive reviews being written for hundreds of games on Steam.
Please do read and share far and wide.
Hundreds of Games are Faking Their Reviews, Here's How
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Sentinels_of_the_Store/announcements/detail/4222762959836264571
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