Another Steam saga seemingly comes to a close.
If there’s anything I pride myself on here at MMO Fallout it’s the ability to spot patterns. In the realm of Steam it’s given us more insight into a world of money laundering, fraud, item scams, and all sorts of fun stuff. This week I noticed a pattern of developers adding keyword spam to their game titles. I wrote about it not because I thought anything nefarious was going on but because I thought it was interesting. My assumption was that I was seeing a trail where it didn’t really exist.
I spoke to a couple of the developers and confirmed that it was in fact a moderately coordinated experiment related to Steam’s search algorithm. Effectively the folks that made Ranch Simulator have been doing this for a while now, and other developers wanted to see how it worked for them.
And then last night I noticed that those same games had begun wholesale removing the keyword spam, including the Ranch Simulator developers. As with the addition the removal seemed too coordinated, so I asked the same developers if the removal was due to Valve and the answer was yes kind of. Valve hasn’t contacted all of the developers who used this system, but I assume those who haven’t heard anything probably will after the weekend at some point, but Valve has been asking deveopers to remove the keywords in their game names. Some of the developers weren’t contacted, but heard that others were, and proactively removed them.
So there’s the story on Steam’s weird keyword subplot. Enjoy your weekends.
MMO Fallout 