Nice job, and yeah I agree this looks to be review manipulation

The offending reviews are in Simplified Chinese, but the dev isn't from China, which is rather unusual.

Looking into the contents, the reviews have similar formatting and punctuation, and refer to the game's title/theme in a similar way, therefore probably written by the same person. There're also some unusual grammar/word choice errors, which makes me think some kind of machine-assisted translation was involved.

Thanks a bunch for the alert!

I'll tag it on our curator and I'll try to follow up further on this case with Valve in a couple of days time.

Interesting... I've been working with them for quite some time, and they've been on Steam since 2011, which is also not a couple of months what you could expect from new devs. Honestly they don't look like the type that would engage in such activities. It's gonna suck if it turns out to be true, hopefully it won't.

Hey guys, I was just made aware of this by a post on the game's forums, apologies for not clearing this up sooner. Let me also just quickly apologize to anyone who thought we were involved in fraudulent activities, I hope I can clear all of this up!

Originally posted by wind_candle:

The offending reviews are in Simplified Chinese, but the dev isn't from China, which is rather unusual.

One of the developers is Chinese, she is credited in the game for the animation (Baoying Bilgeri, Tobi's wife). The reviews are from friends of hers who installed Steam just to play it. They must have genuinely liked it, which is why they posted reviews with their fresh accounts.

It's up to you to decide if this is, in fact, manipulation (friends write reviews for friends all the time, and they are usually positive, I know it because I've done it). But given the fact that we are on Steam for a long time (we received our first SDK almost 10 years ago), it would really hurt us more to try and mislead our customers, than to just let the game speak for itself. I personally think it's actually really good, so the reviews are not way off.

Thanks to the OP for giving us the benefit of the doubt, and again, apologies for the confusion. I hope this clears things up, and we can put this to rest. We can ask the reviewers to delete their reviews if you think it's necessary to prove good faith.

If you have further questions or advice, shoot.

Cheers,
Jones (on behalf of Black Pants)

EDIT: typo

Originally posted by deathbuffer:

Hey guys, I was just made aware of this by a post on the game's forums, apologies for not clearing this up sooner. Let me also just quickly apologize to anyone who thought we were involved in fraudulent activities, I hope I can clear all of this up!

Originally posted by wind_candle:

The offending reviews are in Simplified Chinese, but the dev isn't from China, which is rather unusual.

One of the developers is Chinese, she is credited in the game for the animation (Baoying Bilgeri, Tobi's wife). The reviews are from friends of hers who installed Steam just to play it. They must have genuinely liked it, which is why they posted reviews with their fresh accounts.

It's up to you to decide if this is, in fact, manipulation (friends write reviews for friends all the time, and they are usually positive, I know it because I've done it). But given the fact that we are on Steam for a long time (we received our first SDK almost 10 years ago), it would really hurt us more to try and mislead our customers, than to just let the game speak for itself. I personally think it's actually really good, so the reviews are not way off.

Thanks to the OP for giving us the benefit of the doubt, and again, apologies for the confusion. I hope this clears things up, and we can put this to rest. We can ask the reviewers to delete their reviews if you think it's necessary to prove good faith.

If you have further questions or advice, shoot.

Cheers,
Jones (on behalf of Black Pants)

EDIT: typo

Hi Jones.

Thanks for leaving a response with regards to the user's findings.

While I hold personal issue with some of the explanation offered with regards to the friends and new account scenario, I'll allow people in this group to make their own judgement.

However, one thing I'd like to make mention of, if this is in fact the case and what happened, these reviews and endorsements of your game still fall against the Federal Trade Commission guidelines, as they require for family and friends giving reviews and such (or sharing experiences) disclose this personal relationship.

This can be read up on further here[www.ftc.gov]

Originally posted by FTC:

I’m opening a new restaurant. To get feedback on the food and service, I’m inviting my family and friends to eat for free. If they talk about their experience on social media, is that something that should be disclosed?

You’ve raised two issues here. First, it may be relevant to readers that people endorsing your restaurant on social media are related to you. Therefore, they should disclose that personal relationship. Second, if you are giving free meals to anyone and seeking their endorsement, then their reviews in social media would be viewed as advertising subject to FTC jurisdiction. But even if you don’t specifically ask for their endorsement, there may be an expectation that attendees will spread the word about the restaurant. Therefore, if someone who eats for free at your invitation posts about your restaurant, readers of the post would probably want to know that the meal was on the house.

Looking at the reviews in question, in legal terms, it still would fall into the category of unlawful advertising of the product seeing as how appropriate disclosures weren't given in the reviews and there's further background knowledge that potential customers should be made aware of that isn't present on the reviews.

Take that for what you will.
Thanks again.

It's encouraging to see this form of response given!

Thanks Jones.

I hope you follow through with this!