Tag: review

Valve has taken an axe to a fair number of Steam games this week, but for this edition of Steam Cleaned I’m going to focus on Berarts Ltd. who appears to have been banned for rigging Steam reviews. I can’t confirm this 100% because they haven’t made a comment nor is Valve going to say anything publicly, but after viewing the company’s itinerary of games there are some discrepancies that must be noted.

First let’s point out their six titles:

• The Pyramid Prison
• Pentagonal Saloon
• Pentagonal Saloon 2
• Karar X
• Awaiting Salvation
• Platonic Paranoia

Particularly that Berarts games have a lot of repeat reviewers. Take Lowell here who owns two unbanned games yet managed six product reviews.

Going through the review list by hand, I managed to find a ton of accounts that look a lot like Lowell; Accounts private so I can’t see their reviews on one page, own less unbanned games than they have reviews for (and have not reviewed), and just happened to review the entire library of Berarts games or most of them.

• Benedict: Private account, 1 product on account, reviews on all six titles.
• Lowell: Private account, 2 products on account, reviews on all six titles.
• __KaiserSoze__: Private account, 2 products on account, reviews on four titles.
• Manle: Private account, 16 products on account, reviews on all six titles.
• Racheldaws: Private account, 3 products on account, reviews on all six titles.
• AndersVoice: No info, 1 product on account, reviews on all six titles.
• Stephen: Private account, 20 products on account, reviews on all six titles.

I won’t bore you by going over every name on the list but there are a lot of accounts reviewing Berarts Games that meet the criteria above, way too many to be a coincidence. Evidently Valve saw the same because Berarts is no longer welcome on the Steam platform along with several other developers. But more on them later.