Don’t solicit reviews.
Aether Games Inc. is one of the latest developers to find themselves banned off of Steam for unscrupulous behavior. Aether Games had one title on Steam, that being the conveniently named Aether. Aether is a trading card game that uses NFTs, so we already know the devs are honest and trustworthy.
NFT and crypto games are of course banned on Steam, so mark that one strike. Second strike? Soliciting positive reviews for rewards is against Steam terms of service and we’ve seen it routinely enforced with full-on developer bans. Aether was first covered on October 25 by the Steam Sentinels group, noting that users were specifically being asked to add positive reviews and to avoid mention of crypto/NFT stuff because Steam users are smarter than that.
A post on the official Medium page also very blatantly asks for positive reviews in violation of Valve’s terms of service. Mellow’s post on Steam Sentinels calculates about $405 in crypto monies worth of fake positive reviews. Estimated real world value of said crypto outside of the fake economy; thirty five cents and dropping.
The dev commented on the removal in a now-vaporized Tweet saying they were “looking into” the situation but refusing to acknowledge that the game was in-fact banned. MMO Fallout would have reached out for comment, but the developer has blocked communications with us.
Moral of the story; don’t break Steam TOS.
MMO Fallout 