Valve has eliminated a handful of Steam curator pages after a digital sting operation uncovered them as a part of an obvious rip-off to accumulate and resell free recreation keys.
In a Twitter thread posted earlier this week, Brok the Investigator developer Fabrice Breton mentioned the flood of free recreation key requests he received from Steam curators after his recreation’s latest launch. Whereas a few of these curator pages have been little question legit, Breton suspected many extra have been scammers utilizing artificially inflated curator pages to get free recreation keys. These free keys may then be transformed into chilly laborious money by way of gray-market code resellers like G2A, thus consuming into legit gross sales that revenue the developer.
To separate the rip-off curators from the actual ones, Breton stated he responded to these key requests with keys for the free, restricted Prologue model of the sport fairly than the total launch. Whereas these keys can be indistinguishable from full ones earlier than redemption, any curators really considering taking part in the sport would rapidly understand the distinction and attain out about the issue.
Just a few curators complained, “confirming that almost all of these emails are from scammers who didn’t even activate these keys on their account earlier than posting a evaluation” as Breton put it. The sport’s fast availability on key resale websites additionally means that most of the free keys Breton despatched out weren’t being performed by the recipients.
Did you even play the sport?
Following this little experiment, Breton says he seen “a great chunk of ‘suspicious’ damaging evaluations” for his recreation popping up from among the curators that received the Prologue keys. That included many curators for which Brok was the one recreation with a damaging evaluation and some curators who flipped their advice from constructive to damaging (probably after “getting indignant purchasers coming again at them” from resale websites, in response to Breton).
“These evaluations are 100% faux as a result of, contemplating I despatched them Prologue keys, they could not play the total recreation,” Breton famous. And whereas Steam’s extra direct consumer evaluation system requires reviewers to truly personal and play the sport being reviewed, a curator web page can advocate or pan any recreation within the Steam catalog.
Reddit consumer darklinkpower did a deep dive on the curators that panned Brok and famous a lot of suspicious similarities between a lot of them, together with an identical creation dates and admins. All of these curator pages are not obtainable as of Wednesday morning, although, after an obvious purge by Valve for “violating the Steam Group Guidelines and Pointers” (among the curator pages are presently nonetheless obtainable in Google cached variations from latest weeks).
“One way or the other, I really feel simply slight guilt over it now,” Breton writes of his obvious position in getting these curators eliminated. “I am conscious these scammers typically dwell in much less lucky nations the place making a residing is more durable. However they need to do constructive work, constructing one thing as an alternative of filling our mailbox with spams and leeching off the work of others.”
Breton really helpful that Valve modify Steam’s Curator Join program to restrict the flood of faux requests builders face and to let builders determine and confirm trusted curators. Breton additionally desires Steam to “not enable curators to evaluation video games they do not personal [or] no less than enable gamers to see which curator evaluations have been completed by taking part in the sport and the way a lot play time.”