I think there's merit in having a place people can ask about suspicious looking games. It's not always obvious who's behind an asset flip/scam, and I think we should welcome those kinds of questions because we can act as a community in response to better understand what's going on.

The first 3 look more like Daniel Li/Hardi etc than Cristian Manolachi's work. But the rest look more like Cristian's asset flips. Or perhaps there's a relationship there. Certainly, they're both customers of Obzor/Mipped. But even when Sentinels first uncovered Obzor, it was obvious they would just close their doors and open up again with a different name the next day.

The sheer number of fake reviews on these asset flips is astonishing.

I have a hard time finding the source for the GameMaker Studios asset flips.

Looking at "Blastforce Breach", you can see it was also flipped by Garage Games as "Brittle" but that game was removed from Steam (presumably in the first wave of bans). But you can see a screenshot here that tells us it's the same GameMaker Studio asset:

https://gg.deals/game/brittle/

Edit: Indeed, most of the GameMaker Studio games appearing above are copy + paste + renames of the games that were banned 11 months ago.

Originally posted by Shattered mind:

speaking of that tingly feeling: https://steamhost.cn/app/3854520/Blast_Radius/

for the low amount of reviews suspiciously high number of Atomic Fabrik regulars.

More than a tingly feeling, 30+ reviews all appeared on day 1, and no other review activity. I ran it through my checker and yeah, they're all Obzor/Mipped.

I absolutely agree you get a "feel" for those fake reviews with a lot of experience, but you're also right in that Sentinels understandably doesn't like "baseless" claims... these are serious accusations we're throwing around. Yes, these are bad actors harming Steam, harming gamers, and even harming other developers by giving indie/amateur devs a bad name... so when we make these accusations we have to be damn sure!

It's an interesting way to approach the problem. What I did was write a script to pick up when games have a very large number of reviews occuring on one day, then comparing those reviews with reviews from accounts that I know for sure are from Obzor/Mipped... basically there's a few asset flips like the ones from LTZinc that have no reviews apart from fake ones.

So if you mark those accounts and then keep tracking where they show up and combine that with games that have the same pattern of reviews as other asset flips, well, I've built up quite a database of fake reviewer accounts. Obviously, you know, those reviews are positive, mine almost always aren't, but I'm fussy about what makes for a good game.

Originally posted by Shattered mind:

Originally posted by Selective Oblivion:

I can't comment on the reviews as I don't yet have an eye to spot the fake patterns

things to look out for:

2) counter to above - suspicious ammount of very high review count accounts(500+ reviews) = Paid reviews

Hey I've done way more reviews than 500 and I promise you nobody paid a cent for me to tell gamers those games were trash.

I had to check a few times but I think you are right on this second one... no fake reviews came up (surprisingly). The reviews on Cafe Dash seemed legit. That pricing definitely is NOT legit, though.

Doesn't sound right to me, why didn't they just make a censored version for consoles and keep the PC version as-is? Was crossplay that important to them?

Here's a good one:

https://steamhost.cn/app/3222850/Doctor_Dash_ASMR_Hospital/

It's a mobile app with $367 worth of DLC and well over 50 fake/paid reviews from Obzor/Mipped. And a cash shop embedded in it too.

Originally posted by Madnesis:

Reviews manipulation:

Yes, this is Whale Rock Games, a known asset flipper. The "game" itself is a basic "Digital Homicide" style asset flip, a minimum viable product meant to carry fake reviews to mislead and scam gamers through game bundles and anyone hapless enough to fall for the fake reviews and buy the product, to defraud a few Steam gamers out of some roubles.

Whale Rock are very specific in paying for around 100 fake reviews for each of their many asset flips, and "Swords Fantasy" is a pretty typical example of that. It's also interesting that the fake reviews for that asset flip arrived in waves of 5-10 fake reviews at a time, some very recent, others many years old.