Hiya!

Thanks for sharing!

I got tagged in the initial thread on X.

I've reached out to OnepegMG to share an unredacted message to me to enable me to share it with Steam.

Thanks very much for sharing this with the community.

While I'm here, I'll share a statement I issued on X regarding both this specific incident and review manipulation as a whole.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Developers trying to coordinate review manipulation off-platform is a serious violation of Steam’s rules. Glad to see this getting attention - it’s exactly what harms players and creators alike.

Review manipulation is one of the greatest issues that place pressure on the Steam platform to this date.

Following our discovery of the Obzor network last year, it highlighted just how widespread and under-reported the fake review network is.

We're currently working with partners within Steam, within other game publishing companies who have contacted me and Sentinels of the Store about this problem, and of course, consumers, to ensure these problems get the attention that they deserve, and that Steam gets the support that it needs to identify instances where this is happening.

This is our most significant long-term project to date.

While we’ll continue reporting on a wide range of topics in the short term, action against review manipulation is ongoing.

Companies are being held accountable - for the publishers who play by the rules, the developers who deserve a fair chance, and the consumers who rely on accurate representation and trust in the system.

This network’s days are numbered. That’s a promise.

If you find a service offering positive reviews as a service to Steam developers...send it to me. I'll make it my mission to ensure it's shut down.

Originally posted by Bobogoobo:

If I may ask - will the blog or another source have roundups of the big names/issues to look for? Having to follow every forum here and read every thread of speculation and duplicate reports would be very time consuming. It would be better to only see confirmed and important information. Thank you for your work!

Hi Bobogoobo,

First of all, love the name!

Second of all, our announcements will continue to cover some notably bigger stories or highlight something we think it worth shining a grander light on, although of course, part of what we love about our forums is that it allows the community to get more involved, and with all of us having full time jobs on the core staff team, we struggle to keep up with EVERYTHING that comes out.

In fairness, there's on average 1 new thread once every 3/4 days, and really this Steam Game Sharing Thread wasn't really here to serve that purpose either, however it may very well be something we look at in the near future to get something like this set up, maybe in the form of a newsletter.

Hope that answers your question!

Hi all!

As mentioned a while back, as per our discussion forum cleanup, we will be sunsetting our Steam Game Sharing Thread here to encourage users to make threads specific to games/developers they're reporting on to allow for easier information sharing and easier tracking of active issues.

For good games, we also have our new 'Positive Pool' forum!

The thread here won't be deleted, but will be locked and archived.

I can now confirm that this thread will be sunset on TUESDAY, AUGUST 26TH.

Originally posted by robilar5500:

With regards to avoiding community bans, you don't need to own the game to curate it, and you can link this thread on said curation. So, if you curate the game(s) here and in any other groups where you have access to curation, and as mentioned, link this thread in the curation, it will get some views, and the developer is powerless to respond, much less try to punish you. It might also actually get more views than posting in the game(s) forum.

You can apply this philosophy to any scam dev reporting. Just create a thread here to report on it, curate the game(s) in question, and link the created thread in the curation. Won't have to deal with community bans due to posting in the sus game's forum, that way.

That's part of the planned curation overhaul part of our road map this year! Ensuring discussions for uncurated apps are linked and tagged.

Hi all, a reminder:

1) Please keep all discussion relevant to the post, no topic derailment please and thanks!

2) We don't tolerate any spreading of anti-semitic views or any kind of attacks against any ethnic groups - it's certainly not an area that's in our lane to talk about as well.

3) As @Poor huwhyte Carl rightly states, our focus is on fraudulent game devs on the Steam platform as opposed to wider culture war topics. We know our lane and we're sticking to it as we've had a very positive impact thus far and would hate for this to get blindsided.

4) If there is problematic postings observed by users, please don't engage with the posts, just flag them and allow us, the mod team, to handle them.

Thanks guys! :)

Hello all,

For the past two months, as per our roadmap, we have been working on ways that we can improve our discussion forums, as up until now, we have only had the one big forum with over 400 threads for conversation now currently exist.

Me and the moderators, to help organise the forums more, will be rolling out the following sub forums starting today:

• Rules & Information - Our forum for our rules and our how to help threads.
  
• Asset Flips - Games that are asset flips.
  
• Censorship - Instances where developers have partaken in censorship, either on forums or attempting to take down negative reviews
  
• Copyright/Trademark/Legal Issues - as the title suggests
  
• Dirty Devs - Discussing a developer/studio more as a whole rather than a particular "game" or whose anti-consumer practices may encompass topics that go into more than one forum.
  
• Dead Games - Alerting of games that are multiplayer only with no players and/or early access games which have been abandoned.
  
• Harassment - Cases where developers have harassed members of the Steam community.
  
• Review Manipulation - This includes review bombing incidents (positive and negative) and exposing fake reviews.
  
• Scams/Fraudulent Activity - any game scams or instances of fraud/misrepresentation.
  
• Steam Store Policies & Updates - Policy changes or developments with the store as a whole, or generally talk about Steam's stance on "x"
  
• The Positive Pool - A place to share good games, good developers or good gaming experiences.
  
• Other - Anything that (for now)doesn't fit in the other forums. (If we start to observe loads of threads appearing around another specific topic, then we will look to update our sub forums with a new one for this topic depending on how notable it's becoming)

We will be rolling these new sub forums out today and over the course of May and June will be moving topics (starting with our oldest and inactive ones) to these new sub forums. This will mean that over the course of the next two months, our forums may start to look messier before it ultimately will look cleaner, as me and the mods are only able to see to these moves when we each have some time to spare.

It may also mean some bugs and glitches may occur with notifications when we get to the newer and more active topics, as sometimes Steam freaks out when sending a notification to a thread that has since been moved, so we can only apologise for any potential inconvenience that these changes will cause in the short term.

A reminder as well, our STEAM GAME SHARING THREAD will be getting locked in the near future when we are nearing the end of our cleanup. The thread will not be deleted, but only locked and archived, as we all felt the thread further allows for untidiness and where a lot of the conversations there would be better suited for their own individual threads within our new sub forums. I'll give a 2 week notice in the thread ahead of our closure date, as I'm aware a lot of users do use it. After it's closure, do please feel free to make a discussion thread in the relevant sub forum for whatever you planned to discuss!

Thanks all, any questions, please do let me know!

- Mellow & the Sentinels of the Store team

Originally posted by Shattered mind:

regardless of which DMCA they reacted to, it's still about 2 months late from the first one filed. I wonder if his little switcheroo actually worked and fooled Valve and/or Sarah.

Was a DMCA filed in the first case you speak of? I've been told by Steamworks developers that the DMCA system is automated and are acted on within 48 hours once the filings have concluded.

Originally posted by Shattered mind:

Originally posted by Mellow_Online1:

At the bare minimum, Echo Leap and Toot Adventure are by the same developer, both have support email addresses pertaining to a "zmxhot"

Cut it and Impossible Moto Sim also share a support address pertaining to Clava Stove, so yes, same person for those two as well.

Whether these 4 games are connected together and pertain to Atomic Fabrik is yet to be cemented.

yeah my spider-sense concerning these things are rarely wrong...:goblin:
that said going forward it would be nice to know where you find the support-mails listed, I can't seem to find it?

There's an older method I had of using this link and pasting it into a web browser and changing the App ID, which still does very much work, but there is an easier means now:

Example: https://steamhost.cn/help_steampowered_com/en/wizard/HelpWithGameTechnicalIssue?appid=3648420

The alternative is using the Augmented Steam plugin on your web browser and it displays the email on the store pages: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/augmented-steam/dnhpnfgdlenaccegplpojghhmaamnnfp

Originally posted by Shattered mind:

Originally posted by Mellow_Online1:

They removed it because of a DMCA

yes? and the original DMCA from Sarah Kwon was(at least AFAIK) filed two months ago - that's an extremely subpar reaction time given to blatant and dokumentet theft... especially considering that Hard Shark Games managed to get two members of this forum banned nearly instantly.

also, why would you ever continue doing business with a developer that has already had multiple complaints filed against them and at least 3 proven cases of theft?

The DMCA doesn't seem to have come from Sarah, but rather Chibig, given the timing of them declaring on their forums on April 23rd to have filed their report and the game going down April 24th.

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/app/1819460/discussions/0/600776460504970383/

But yes, it is a wonder given how much of a legal liability Mr.Ginard very much is that Valve have taken action on selected games but not his account. Other developers have been hit far harder for far less. As is often the case, there is unfortunate consistency to their inconsistencies.

They removed it because of a DMCA