Originally posted by GraVe:

Originally posted by Jillas:

No, it won't help, because reviews for the games that was activated by cheap keys won't affect the user score, and even if you purchase them via Steam, your single negative review will not outweigh 10+ paid positive reviews, 1 negative review vs 10 positive will still left this game with 90%+ positive user score, so no point in doing that. We need Valve to act and ban every publisher who used Obzor services, only that could make them think twice before abusing the review system.

for example: 28% positive
https://steamhost.cn/app/1955000/3D_PUZZLE__Alchemist_House/

83% positive
https://steamhost.cn/app/2466850/3D_PUZZLE__Battle_Royal/

78% positive
https://steamhost.cn/app/2703250/3D_PUZZLE__Breaking_Bed/

91% pos
https://steamhost.cn/app/2630810/3D_PUZZLE__Building/

66% pos
https://steamhost.cn/app/1990310/3D_PUZZLE__Castle/

.. well 1 vote can turn this from "scam with keys" to "only scam on steam" xD

Yes, I checked the review scores myself and yes most of their games now has negative score, but look at the release dates, all their games is from 2023 and only one game is from Jan 2024, I assume these games already were used in bundle scams and because these devs are limited to 5000 keys only, after they sold 5000 keys via offsite bundles they don't even care what happens with these games next, so they make these 99% off Steam bundles that can generate them a few more bucks from random buyers... Sadly, it's now a left overs of past scams, that now only pile up the Steam store...

Originally posted by GraVe:

so you want me to write now negative reviews of these "games" ? :)

No, it won't help, because reviews for the games that was activated by cheap keys won't affect the user score, and even if you purchase them via Steam, your single negative review will not outweigh 10+ paid positive reviews, 1 negative review vs 10 positive will still left this game with 90%+ positive user score, so no point in doing that. We need Valve to act and ban every publisher who used Obzor services, only that could make them think twice before abusing the review system.

Originally posted by GraVe:

its hard money laundry?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRklKoexsbI That video explains that for money laundering they wouldn't have reasons to make more than 1 single game, but the reason they actually make so many games and use high prices is to prevent people from buying them and leaving negative reviews, because as long as their games has 80%+ review score, they can scam people with random steam key bundles!

Random Steam keys was a good thing back in a day, I purchased like 10 or 15 such random keys once, because the games in them were actually real ones, but now I won't recommend buying random steam key bundles, because of such people like Cristian Manolachi who abused Steam rating system with paid reviews and now Steam review score is actually not a reliable metric anymore...

Originally posted by Obey the Fist!:

Yeah it does seem like Valve has no direct interest in the quality of Steam, and like many things Valve does, while it's well intentioned, it ends up doing more harm than good.

Greenlight, to help indie devs get their games published on Steam? Overwhelmingly abused by asset flippers that drown out the genuine indie games.

Steam Direct, to replace Greenlight and help indie devs get their games published on Steam? Overwhelmingly abused by asset flippers that drown out the genuine indie games.

No quality controls for games at all, to let indie devs publish games no matter how bad they are? Steam absolutely drowning in a sea of terrible shovelware games, with genuine indie devs having to battle all of that in the hopes people will see their games.

There's a better way, but Valve prefers to turn a completely blind eye and don't care who or what publishes on the store.

Valve doesn't actually care about indie devs, it's not that I want to start any offtopic discussion here, but I just want to show you this discussion about the new Steam policy that is very harmful for legit indie devs (read comments from #51 to #138 (you can skip the ones that doesn't have community awards), some of these indie devs voiced a very good critique) - https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/groups/steamworks/eventcomments/4428813423380429888/?#c4428813423381068486

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.

Bans for exploit abuse isn't something unheard of, sometimes it can be even a temporary ban just to stop person from doing more harm, just till they decide what to do with the exploiters. We just don't know if Valve actually did any of that, because there wasn't any official announcement regarding this incident, and if it was a mass thing we would have more people claiming that they were banned, so it's safe to assume that if there was any bans related to this exploit, they were very scarce and probably related to something else, maybe that person also tried to spoof his location to purchase the game that wasn't available in his region in his local currency prior to be removed from sale and thus he might have been banned for using exploit on top of breaking a ToS agreement.

Originally posted by Shattered mind:

honestly Valve should seriously consider outright banning Russian devs. I don't really care that some of them are honest - the upside seriously outweighs the risks, considering the current world climate and the rise of cyber-criminality/attacks coming out of Russia, whether state-sponsored or not. Valve has on numerous occasions shown that whatever checks they have in place for submissions to the store, they are not enough to prevent "bad actors" from uploading infected files and considering the steam store's near monopoly and widespread use, that's quite a lot of damage that can be done... just imagine all steam user's computers becoming part of a bot-net! :2016whoadude:

There's no Russian devs on Steam, I mean you need to give Steam a working bank account and all Russian banks are no good for it, so all Russian devs has to register a foreign bank account and they considered not Russian from a legal point of view. And it's not just a recent thing, 99% of Russian devs had Cyprus address so they could save on taxes, I guess there was a few individual solo devs from Russia who had they Steam partner accounts registered as Russian residents prior the conflict (when it was available to them), but I don't think you were worrying about the small fry, and even small fry now has to go to Kazakhstan to open a bank account to do business on Steam. So technically they are Kazakhstan developers now...

Originally posted by Occular Malice:

Yeah true, however what's the chances of any of these titles making $1000?

There's few ways of doing that, if you announce that the game will be delisted, thousand of game collectors will buy it no matter the quality of the game.

Originally posted by Occular Malice:

How does anyone have $1500 to throw away on publishing all those titles to Steam. I can't even afford $100 for one.

Well, they actually need only $100 Dollars, as soon as their game makes $1000 (which actually isn't that hard even for a no-name asset flip), you'll get your $100 back, but actually that sum is even lower, because even $150 is enough to get your $100 back ($150-30% Valve's cut = $105)

But we both know why they doing that, because they too greedy to sell the game on Steam for the same 70 dollars, but getting only 49 dollars per sale due to Steam commission, so they are selling it for 117 dollars -35 dollars (Steam Tax) that way they earn 82 dollars per sale and it's the same amount that Valve actually recommend to sell the 70-dollar game in Israel (10 bucks higher)