Originally posted by Jillas 🐰:

Originally posted by Ryuu:

Don't you think if they keep doing it — there must be some profit though? I don't mean they have good sales on Steam, it's unlikely, and i don't expect them to recoup $100 fee, but probably they make more than $100 by selling Steam keys for trash bundles?

If you consider that some (if not all) of these games can have paid reviews via Obzor website, then they have no problem to recoup $100, they did it a long time ago and can push more games basically for free, they just need to sell up to 2000 copies (0.50c per copy, lowest possible price, less copies if their cost is higher) to exceed $1000 mark, but it shouldn't be too hard to do if people are promised to get their money back as well as keeping the game for free.

Small correction: they need to sell a bit more since Valve's 30% cut is not included (gross revenue).

Originally posted by Jillas:

they just need to sell up to 2000 copies (0.50c per copy, lowest possible price, less copies if their cost is higher) to exceed $1000 mark, but it shouldn't be too hard to do if people are promised to get their money back as well as keeping the game for free.

It's insane that this can be profitable despite all losses due to Steam cut, taxes and payouts :(

To stop this circus Steam should somehow make this unprofitable... Some ask them to raise Steam Direct Fee, but Steam wants to be accessible and to not miss out on indie gems, sleeper hits. Imagine some self-taught developer from some third world country who can't find a publisher or doesn't want to — current Steam Direct fee is likely still accessible for them, in the worst case with a bank or personal loans. But if it was $1000 dollars — it would hurt both scammers and truly indie devs.
Some games on Steam are completely free, because paying $100 out of personal savings is not a problem for most of the world — they wouldn't exist with a higher fee.

Some suggest Valve to hire an army of game quality moderators or something like that — but they would never do it, it's not a scalable approach.

I hope Valve is thinking on some bigger plan to stop this. But since there are no signs yet — either this situation does not hurt them much yet or they have no idea how to approach it :(

Originally posted by Obey the Fist!:

The games are all Profile Features Limited which means they didn't get enough sales that Valve will refund the listing fee.

AFAIK it's not that simple, 99% sure you can recoup the fee, yet have Profile Features Limited, otherwise creators would not ask "how to get rid of Profile Features Limited" in Steamworks forum, since the answer would be trivial.

But if you'll ask for exact quote where i've read about such cases — at the moment forum search is broken on Steam :(

Don't you think if they keep doing it — there must be some profit though? I don't mean they have good sales on Steam, it's unlikely, and i don't expect them to recoup $100 fee, but probably they make more than $100 by selling Steam keys for trash bundles?

Originally posted by Occular Malice:

Also the information you're asking for is already there on a game page. For example look at any game in the curated list we have. There's a Curator Review box on that game page saying what list it's in (asset flips, lies, etc.) with details. So again what are you actually looking for that isn't there today?

How many times do i have to repeat what's already been said in this forum thread?!?!

• NOT ALL GAMES get curated! You can't curate all Qumaron games — there's too many, it's not feasible, too much manual work for little gain
  
• They'll have more games in the FUTURE. Does anyone monitor their new releases currently? Of course not! And that's where this data is most useful — when deciding should you trust that creator or not with buying some their new game.
  
• As mentioned above curators have a LIMIT of 2000 curated games, so even if you could automate curating all current games and future games by Qumaron — it's likely not a feasible approach

Though if you think this approach deserves some pondering — yes, maybe. After all the big advantage is that data would be visible even when using Steam client. But then SotS would likely need to create more curators when it hits 2000 games limit.
And Steam users have a limit too — you can only follow up to 100 curators (that includes creator pages — developers, publishers, franchises). I'm already at this limit and each time i find another worthy curator — i have to find some less useful curator to unfollow.
And that's why the approach with automating curation of all games from the bad actors does not seem a good one.

Originally posted by Obey the Fist!:

This is a weird problem with Steam curation that you're capped to 2000 games per curator group.

But time has shown that bad actors and those who seek to abuse Steam and the gaming public through scams, copyright infringement, review manipulation and asset flipping have easily shoved more than 2,000 trash games onto Steam.

↑ This. I'm almost sure if you try covering all games of current bad actors with curations — you'll hit the limit.

Originally posted by Occular Malice:

The data isn't "here" other than for a human to visually read. It's not structured.

It simply needs to be associated with the developer name (and possible aliases), it's not that something astronomical. I mean manually it's a day of work likely.

Originally posted by Occular Malice:

Curated content isn't useful, although it might be possible to get at a list of curated items then get the apps out of them, but I haven't looked at the Steam API for that

There's no proper API for getting curated games, this can only be scrapped, but since it's one-time task — likely easier to do it manually. Next entries would be added to curator and extension together.

Originally posted by Occular Malice:

You can't scrape data or use tools like Selenium (which uses a GUI to do automated clicks on a web browser).

You can and i did it, Chrome has "--headless" mode which runs the browser without the GUI — it allows scraping websites where a lot of data is formed via Javascript which is difficult to do other way. If you need — i can share C# code fragments and explain how it's usually done. But of course it's the methods of last resort, since it's slow, somewhat cumbersome and changes on the website might break code logic.

Originally posted by Occular Malice:

You need an API and data to read. I get the concept of curating creators you're asking about, but I'm not seeing how it translates to data we can farm much less present on a web page (either stand-alone or as an add-in).

Data of course needs to be manually prepared, just like currently Mellow writes curations. Imagine a website for him where he can make curations on Steam creators which are added to the database which then gets used by the extension.
You mean you can't work together with Mellow despite being moderator here or what's the difficulty?

For many things on Steam there's no proper API or it's non-public and non-documented, and sometimes all that's left is data scraping. But that's only required if you wish to convert existing data to usable form without human involvement which i think is not feasible. For simplicity let's imagine that only new curations would be added for now, and older one would be manually added later if there's no better way (AI could probably process old texts, but i wouldn't trust AI-quality).

Originally posted by Occular Malice:

From your description it's a bit of a chicken and egg issue. You're asking for more information (maybe curated by SoS members) about games to show warnings, infractions, etc. and dates.

I'm asking about basically the same what SotS now is doing but with data attached to the creator (developer/publisher) directly instead of their specific games, is that clear?

It would be SotS curator but as a browser extension and for curating creators, so on the page of any new game of those bad actors the current info would be shown (well, assuming they don't hide their affiliation of course).

As for database — it might be integrated at first, then external if SotS can afford the hosting (also some may try hacking it). AFAIK at the moment SotS is just a Steam group/curator, with no website and servers. Special structured subforum with limited access could be used as a database, but that requires reverse-engineering endpoints for pulling topics or scraping data with something like Selenium (btw i know the JSON endpoint for getting topic comments and how to use it, but haven't dug into fetching forum topics).

Data is here: in SotS curations and announcements, but it needs to be structured of course.

> that site itself would be good enough to see these bad actors
That's inconvenient which is what's keeping SotS from getting more publicity and weight in my opinion.

Originally posted by Occular Malice:

Not sure I'm understanding what you're asking for or what this thing looks like. I'm interested to build it, just need to understand what problem it's solving.

Do you see how curations for games work currently? Now imagine if curators could instead curate creators directly instead of games, i don't know why it needs to be repeated as many times.

I must be that bad at explaining

Yes, and also it's not easy keeping an eye on all their new games — where users need this information the most!

Well, simple example, look at the recent reviews: «Qumaron have previously revoked Steam keys from paying customers and then removed the corresponding game files» + link to: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/groups/Sentinels_of_the_Store/announcements/detail/4157463936692986362

Qumaron has dozens of games and would have more dozens in the future — it's quite unrealistic to curate all current ones and then also curate future ones when they get released. In reality this info should not be attached to a specific game, but to Qumaron itself: i.e. it should be displayed at every store page (+maybe game hub too) where Qumaron is the developer/publisher, and additionally i think on the search page:
https://steamhost.cn/search/?developer=Qumaron
https://steamhost.cn/search/?publisher=Qumaron
and/or creator page if they have it:
https://steamhost.cn/developer/AngelStarStudios as example.

So in simple words as i said: it should be similar to curations for games but for creators instead. So it seems the browser extension is they only viable way of implementing it.

I don't mean it should supplant the current approach, only complement it — especially since some users tend to browse using Steam client often.

Yeah, i understand it's risky since they can sue for slander, etc, but... can't they already anyway? They don't care much because Sentinels of the Store currently don't have a lot of weight and publicity. A useful Steam browser extension might be a step in the right direction.
And I think SotS should aim be like game journalism 2.0 — and maybe even cover positive cases, so it's not all doom and gloom.

@Mellow_Online1, random idea: SteamRep but for Steam publishers/developers, and curated by Sentinels of the Store with factual proofs listed, etc :)
Yeah, you can curate their games, but Qumaron has too many to curate them manually: https://steamhost.cn/curator/27507830/
And they'll have more in the future. So it should be a mark of shame associated with publisher/developer name directly, and if they make a new alias but proven to be the same company — that alias gets added too. And i think it should be in a form of a browser extension like SteamDB does. So visiting the page of their game adds some warning sign that can be expanded to show their infractions and dates of those.

And if it's popular enough — it may force Steam to change their policies hopefully...

Originally posted by Obey the Fist!:

Anyway the original dev can just report the game with a DMCA takedown request, Valve honours those.

Yeap, the reaction is very quick and effective even for just trademark complaint form: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/trademark/createtrademarkcomplaint/

Originally posted by Obey the Fist!:

Not necessary, there's a facility for copyright holders to file a claim directly with Valve, not so different from Youtube.

Yeah, a lawyer is not required, it's just a bunch of info that needs to be filled: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/dmca/create/

Nerd fact: internally it's implemented as two versions of the same form.

No sane person buys those unlike fake Helldivers