Originally posted by ¥aeko:

Have to admit, I am somewhat out of the loop with the "bad actors"

Good for you :) And means they’re not that noticeable unless you start digging deep

Originally posted by ¥aeko:

I was questioning my sanity, thinking that someone bought 111+ copies of this thing to fake the reviews for 40€ a pop... but it was 99 cents on release: https://steamdb.info/app/3231910/

So, looks like there is a new? approach to doing fake-reviews etc.

Why do you think it’s new? Pretty old idea, also bundles were often used for that:
1) those actors usually have a whole bunch of titles they want to review-scam
2) You can disable/enable bundle and change discount at will — meaning can do it late at night so no one else would be able to get it cheap
3) Bundles don’t trigger cooldown on discounts

Mellow previously covered Obzor website — where users could get some money in exchange for reviews, which covered the game and a bit more. The sums were small, but there was hundreds of titles to earn from.


Also remember a thing fixed that year, that games were released for free, gathered or botted reviews then switched to paid and expensive? Well, this is logical continuation of it — making it as cheap as possible instead of free.

Common sense is uncommon
Because of that on one hand there are lots of people who fall for these shenanigans
But on another side we have those paranoids who don’t ever click links in chats and forums and would not download files you’d share with them over cloud storage

Most of the internet are scammers and botnets for spamming and scamming, percentage-wise of course

I’m just amazed they even had to post an entire announcement about it :)

Zerg rushing ratings?
https://youtu.be/qEQFUfaYxbU

I won’t be surprised if they lead puppets to Steam to rate some game :D

Wow!

BTW have you heard about recent +20% increase of Chinese users on Steam?
https://steamhost.cn/hwsurvey/
I bet it’s not real people.

Originally posted by Shattered mind:

I think that's a stretch... the game had no screenshots or video showcasing the game, no proper thumb graphic, no description etc etc.

It had everything within rules, until the dev defaced it.

Originally posted by Shattered mind:

*edit* according to a forum post, apparently the game was removed by the creator and not Valve, so I guess I was too early with the praise(?) - though I'm not exactly sure how you would tell the difference between the two... anyone know?

You can’t remove a game yourself, only Support can, so usually it’s done via a request to them, or in some cases they may decide to take action due to users’ store page reports and/or tickets.

And there’s no 100% way to tell the difference, AFAIK that label is not always correct/the same.
Usually the label is like "<GameName> is no longer available on the Steam store due to request of publisher", but often it’s "<GameName> is no longer available on the Steam store" even when it was due to request.

In current case likely Support did it, but no way to know for sure.