Dr. Omali will teach you how to spot fake reviews.
Hello everyone, it’s Dr. Omali here with another article about Steam. Every now and then I talk about Steam bans, and instead of writing a simple article about Valve’s latest developer ban I thought I’d use it as a teaching tool to explain how I come to some of the conclusions I get to when I explain why a developer was likely banned. Let’s learn together, shall we?
Valve’s latest ban targeted the game Gronions, a game that doesn’t look devastatingly horrible. Certainly not as bad as pretty much any of the Russian political propaganda games we saw banned.
Gronions looks like a perfectly adequate asset flip of a weird platformer and shooter. It’s exactly the kind of game that will come out on Steam and get absolutely no traction because it’s generic as all get out. I’ll even go as far as saying developer Raúl Parada probably put an respectable amount of work and passion into this title. It doesn’t completely strike me as something that was lazily cobbled together. But we’re not here to speculate on the quality of the game or the passion of the developer.
Gronions was banned this week and my speculation is that it was banned due to manipulating Steam reviews. Now admittedly manipulating reviews doesn’t always get a dev banned. And I will explain my reasoning by referencing the forensic tools I used to extract and categorize Gronions reviews. I picked Gronions simply because it was the latest to be banned and also has only ten reviews for the review bot to analyze. We can be lazy too, folks.
The patented MMO Fallout analyzer spit back a few red flags when we put Gronions through the system. First the game has eight positive reviews out of ten total reviews. The two negative reviews came from two accounts with over three thousand games in their possession each. Curators. The eight positive review accounts owned two games total, not each. Of the eight positive accounts one had not set up a community page, three were private, and the rest had no information. Unfortunately they can’t hide anything from my bot.
Both negative reviews came from people given free copies to review, which we know because they flagged as such. Out of the eight positive reviews, five were not purchased through Steam but none of them were flagged as received for free. It’s completely possible the developer sold them off-site. I’m betting they were given to acquaintances to stuff the tip jar because over a month after launch nobody had tried and reviewed the game.
Now I want to show you something cool that the MMO Fallout proprietary software pulled up. Check out this account’s reviews. Three reviews. Yea cool, I hear you say. Doesn’t say much. Gronions reviewed on September 21, other reviews on October 22. Now what about this account. September 21, three reviews on October 22. Or this account. Or this account. Or this account. Or this account.
Do you see the pattern? All of these accounts deciding to review all of these free games on the exact same day. Many of them did it on October 22. A lot of the accounts look like they had dedicated and planned attempts at making them look legit by just posting a few reviews. And they did it after reviewing Gronions, so it’s also possible someone told the developer how suspicious these accounts with no reviews and no purchased games all agreeing his title was the bee’s knees looks, and this was all retroactive.
The cheapest way to do it? All those games are free to play. The fastest way to do it? Just punch out a bunch of reviews on the same day. It’s not like someone’s going to focus on those details later on, right? NinjaLeague’s account was set up the same day it downloaded, played, and reviewed Gronions. User Jilldhaliam5 was also set up the exact same day as their review. None of the accounts had any activity (games owned, reviews, profile activity, etc) to speak of prior to their Gronions review.
I went on the game’s YouTube channel and had a good laugh as the comments section is full of praise by obviously fake accounts with comments like “Anything less than a revolution in gaming, it’s hard to see anything beating out Gronions as my favorite game of 2020. ??” You can tell the accounts are fake because of their uniform username style (all conveniently first name/last name).
Now obviously all of this is just speculation. Speculation based on available information. But reliable speculation in my opinion. Next time on MMO Fallout, we meet the robot that writes my fake idioms.
MMO Fallout 