Bad Steam reviews can be a deadly weapon, like what’s happening with the Brok game right now. Sad observation… Explanations!
The Steam rating system can be a real torture for developers and a weapon against them, while overall it’s a very useful system for the community. This is how Cowcat, the developer behind Brok, explains his mishap with his adventure game.
Steam ratings, a real weapon
In fact, it’s the combination of the rating and curation system that’s problematic. Steam curation lists are created by users and anyone can create them to make it easier for users to find the next game to buy.
The story begins on August 28th, just two days after Brok’s release date. Cowcat explains that the game has been targeted by some Steam curators with suspiciously negative reviews. While many of these curators had hundreds of positive reviews for various other games, some had posted negative reviews specifically about the Brok game. What makes everything suspicious is that many of these curators only had one negative review to their credit, and that was about the game Brok…
A quick follow up
What is the reason for all this? Well, the developer believes this attempt is because they allegedly refused to email free codes in response to requests. In short, a pure and harsh revenge with no basis? As he points out in his thread, indie developers’ inboxes are flooded with numerous, sometimes illegitimate, requests from scammers who take advantage of situations to resell the keys on shady websites.
To avoid this grotesque situation, the Cowcat studio has come up with a trick: to send out free game keys that allow access to the prologue. So the legitimate testers would only have to send an email to warn of the bug and the impossibility of playing the title in full… Except that with a rain of fake notes and a completely corrupt curation system, the scammers obviously didn’t like it .
The silver lining of the case is that Cowcat was able to identify a whole list of questionable curation groups that should be reported to Valve.
