i mean, tbf, there are a lot of joke curations anyway. it's kinda like reviews themselves (some are bad, some are good, some are just troll/spam reviews).

i don't really look at most curators anyway, but, just like reviews, you gotta actually read through them and decide for yourself if they're words are worth the pixels they're typed with or if they're just garbage.

however, it is pretty obvious that the curator review bombs were all fake and actually looks like it may be the same person (or a group of people working with each other or whatever) as they were all really really similar to each other. and that practice is stupid. i do feel like curator reviews perhaps have less weight than regular reviews, though (but i generally only glance at the actual review ratings and the game itself). kudos for a dev being proactive in fake review bombs!

that being said, i wouldn't want curations being removed as i do look at a couple in specific just for a quick glance and can be pretty helpful to me.

Originally posted by Lacy:

i mean, tbf, there are a lot of joke curations anyway. it's kinda like reviews themselves (some are bad, some are good, some are just troll/spam reviews).

i don't really look at most curators anyway, but, just like reviews, you gotta actually read through them and decide for yourself if they're words are worth the pixels they're typed with or if they're just garbage.

however, it is pretty obvious that the curator review bombs were all fake and actually looks like it may be the same person (or a group of people working with each other or whatever) as they were all really really similar to each other. and that practice is stupid. i do feel like curator reviews perhaps have less weight than regular reviews, though (but i generally only glance at the actual review ratings and the game itself).

True, but i believe the function is now useless. The only curators i trust is the ones i write for. Basically, my reviews tend to hit the review wording limit on steam...yes there is a limit on how many words you can write..but alot of times i do less.

and yes..the fake scammers review are always the same..one sentance.

They could also revamp the curator system..like making it harder to make a curator group. For example, having you be on steam for so many years, or reach a certain amount of people in a group. Im sure people would still abuse them, but this would prevent the possibility a little bit. It is not possible to get rid of it completely, but it would curb some of the activity from it.


They could also do a trust factor thing. For example, in some games, if your untrustful, you cannot do certain things. Trust would depend on how many reviews you write, the length of the reviews (more than one sentance, and maybe 2 paragraphs length or something), and how many games you own or something. Again, this would curb some of this, but not completely.

Cheers for this post, we've been aware of people trying to sell developer keys for a few years now, unfortunately this isn't anything new and this is probably the first time a developer has fought back and actually caught the attention of more than just the few groups like ours.

The best practices I can recommend for developers is to only use the Steam Curator Access System, this will give Curators access to your game without giving them a key. Its FAR safer and doesn't allow them to resell it. Also delete and don't ever reply to those emails asking for keys.

Originally posted by Ratchet:

Cheers for this post, we've been aware of people trying to sell developer keys for a few years now, unfortunately this isn't anything new and this is probably the first time a developer has fought back and actually caught the attention of more than just the few groups like ours.

The best practices I can recommend for developers is to only use the Steam Curator Access System, this will give Curators access to your game without giving them a key. Its FAR safer and doesn't allow them to resell it. Also delete and don't ever reply to those emails asking for keys.

Yes, they caught my attention and many news websites about video games. I think the more coverage it gets with unethical practices like this, the better more informed information and people will be aware, just like the common scams people use on discord to steal people's accounts on steam.

I was not aware of the Curator Access system. That does sound safer. They should do that for all games. People who beg for free games are just like these people emailing indie developers. I mean, it must be hard for the indie developer to decide to give out these keys for PR purposes of their game, but in the long run, it is losing them money on their intellectual property. The main loser in this is not steam, but the developers of the game themselves. Considering indie developers usually don't have much money to begin with, it really hurts them when just starting out, and these idiot scammers do not realize this will actually cause game prices to go up higher in the long run, and make them even cost more. Same thing when scalpers sell higher priced tickets for concerts. Some bands have tried to make their price for their tickets so high to try to curb this, but that usually backfires as the scalpers tend to set the price even higher. I believe this practice will get worse before it gets better.

Why do i believe this kind of practices will get worse before it gets better? We are in a evil cycle now. I lived long enough to notice evil and good come in waves around the world. If you lived long enough, you may realize this too. It happened also back in the 1970's too, but not with this many scammers. This one is made worse by how many scammers are currently around. This currently is the most evil wave ive seen since ive been alive. I mean, in real life, someone stole my car twice..and i never got it back second time. I even had a alarm on it, and they somehow still bypassed it and the kill switch. It is really bad now. So practices like this are super common nowadays, and will get worse before they get better.

While it's good that Steam acted quickly and banned these "curators", I think the entire system needs a complete revamp - right now it's just a scammer-filled cesspool used to illegally sell keys, and the legitimate reviewers are hard to come by. I also hope more devs would start doing this "demo" trick to discourage scammers, but they'd probably quickly adapt and learn how to avoid this trap.

Originally posted by M100T:

While it's good that Steam acted quickly and banned these "curators", I think the entire system needs a complete revamp - right now it's just a scammer-filled cesspool used to illegally sell keys, and the legitimate reviewers are hard to come by. I also hope more devs would start doing this "demo" trick to discourage scammers, but they'd probably quickly adapt and learn how to avoid this trap.

I imagine that they won't easily fall into this trap again. They may even check the game files to see if it is legitimate game or not now before selling to illegal sites. Still, im glad a developer stuck it to them, and revealed just how sleezy this system is on steam. If i did not read about this issue on other news gaming sites, i would of never know about how bad this issue is on steam.

I agree, i think the curator system needs a revamp of some kind.