VAIL VR is a 5v5 VR tactical shooter with...that's not important.
It's a polished, original, fun game with an active community of which I am part.
Back in March of 2024, they partnered with YouTube creator Habie147 and MAINGEAR to give away a PC and some VR headsets and such to promote the game.
When this happened, a bunch of very suspicious looking reviews started appearing on the Steam store page. On March 29, 2 days before the giveaway was to be drawn, new suspicious reviews ceased, but the existing reviews stayed up.
Some but not all of the accounts had games in common that they'd reviewed, and none of them had more than 3-4 hours on the game.
Now, this is where you would think that it must have been obvious that the developers were purchasing fake reviews, but consider this:
The game is far more popular on the Meta Quest store, so inflating the reviews on steam would probably have a minimal effect given the cost
Also, bonus giveaway entries were given to people who left reviews on the Meta Quest store, and it may have also been the case that reviewing on steam gave entries as well. I don't remember, and I can't check now that it's ended.
The developers maintain that they had no part in these reviews, and I'd be inclined to trust them if not for their lack of action to remove them.
After watching fireb0rn's recent video on fake steam reviews, where this community was mentioned, I decided to come here with a request:
Can it be proven beyond the shadow of reasonable doubt that these reviews were illegitimately written to inflate the review score? Or is there not enough evidence?
This has been bothering me for a while now, and I'd like to finally put this case to rest, one way or another.
I'll post the relevant links in an addendum, idk the link filtering rules here.