Indie beat ’em up Brok the InvestiGator, released this week on Steam, wasn’t on my radar until the official Twitter account pointed out something odd about the reviews coming in from Steam curators. In a wire (opens in new tab) posted on Sunday, developer Cowcat claimed it was targeted by fraudulent trustees who wrote fake reviews after not even playing the game.
After looking at it for a while, the studio’s reasoning makes sense. Out of 150 user reviews of Brok the InvestiGator published at the time of writing, 99% are positive. As of yesterday morning, the only negative reviews have come from Steam curators (opens in new tab). In the case of several of these curators, Brok is the only negative review the account has ever given on hundreds of games. It appears that a handful of Steam curator reviews, possibly posted by the same person, were written in retaliation for the developer. A day after Cowcat’s thread was posted, the negative reviews from Brok’s trustees had turned into positive ones. Here’s how it all went:
Prior to Brok’s release, Cowcat said it received “tons and tons” of requests from Steam curators asking for a rating code. This is standard practice for legitimate curated pages, streamers and gaming sites, but it also opens the door for scammers hoping to score a free Steam code that they can resell on gray market sites like G2A.
Cowcat hoped to eradicate the scammers with a clever solution. Instead of sending codes for the full game, it sent codes for the free prequel chapter of Brok the InvestiGator, with the idea that legitimate curators would cash in the code and cash in the follow-up to request the full game, while scammers unknowingly put the useless code on the gray market. Cowcat thinks this may have worked a little too well. According to the developer, “very few” questioned why they were given a code for a demo, suggesting that “most of those emails are from scammers who haven’t even activated those keys on their account before they have a review.” posted.”
If so, these scammers may have had to refund their money after they resold the code, and then proceeded to write curated reviews with general critiques such as “broken gameplay” and “lack of shine” to return to Cowcat. It’s circumstantial evidence, but it all started to sound less far-fetched after reading Reddit user darklinkpower’s analysis (opens in new tab) from the appropriate Steam trustees. They point out that the nine trustees who left negative reviews share some pretty suspicious similarities:
- All trustees share a common administrator who can control what is posted
- They were all made on or near the same day
- They all share a similar number of followers (23,000 on average)
- They all had only one or two negative reviews (including Brok the InvestiGator at the time)
It wasn’t long after Cowcat and darklinkpower’s posts gained popularity that the curators changed their negative reviews to positive. The same curator who previously said that Brok “has no frills in all areas” now apparently believes (opens in new tab) Brok is a “beautifully cartoonish detective adventure” with “perfectly integrated beat ’em up mechanics.” Cowcat said it reported the trustees in question to Valve.
It seems strange to me that this practice of revenge is even possible in theory. Individual Steam users cannot post reviews unless they own and have played the game in question, but curated pages do not have that restriction. That sounds like a loophole that needs to be filled, though it’s worth noting that curatorial reviews aren’t as heavily weighted by Valve as user reviews. Curator reviews are in fact separate from user reviews with a small link that I had never noticed until today and which seem to play no part in the overall score visible at the top of the store pages.
Here are all the curated reviews for the game and you can see there are quite a few “suspicious” negative reviews. https://t.co/E2AkLggKWe(1/16) pic.twitter.com/Bu0R1qymvBAugust 28, 2022
Cowcat is equally skeptical about how much curator ratings ultimately matter, but thinks Valve can take steps to reduce scammers. First, Cowcat suggests that Valve “stop forcing us to rely on keys and instead open Curator Connect to everything.”
Curator Connect is a feature on Steam’s backend that allows developers to send games directly to trusted Steam curators. Currently, developers can submit up to 100 copies of their game. That, and the fact that curators have no way of requesting code from developers, limits its usefulness.
I’ve reached out to Valve for comment and will update if I get a response.
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