Valve Bans Titles For Review Manipulation


Several titles hit at once.

Update: Added a statement from Very Positive Developer on Emoji Evolution.

Original:Valve saw fit tonight to swing the banhammer against several Steam developers. The common cause appears to be suspected review manipulation owing mostly to the statements of developers who have commented and looking at the store pages of those who have not commented.

There was another developer ban that we will be covering in a separate article.

Four Ways – Launch Punch

I couldn’t find any social media accounts related to Launch Punch and they haven’t said anything on the game’s forums. Before the ban Four Ways held a 76% mostly positive rating with recent reviews falling into the 65% mixed rating. While it seems likely that this game also got banned due to suspected review manipulation, we won’t know for sure.

Emoji Evolution – Very Positive Developer

Developer Very Positive Developer has commented on the ban only to acknowledge it with no additional information provided at the time of publishing. Emoji Evolution launched on December 10, 2020 and carried a 75% mostly positive rating with a more recent 68% mixed rating.

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Emoji Evolution recently appeared in an article on Kotaku written by Nathan Grayson. The article points to the developer’s use of “Very Positive” as potentially being intentionally misleading due to the similar color and font. The game also headlined a Gamasutra post detailing subtle attempts at review manipulation from developers.

Dininho Adventures – Dininho Games

Dininho Adventures was definitely pulled from Steam over review manipulation. How do I know this? Because the game has an 89% mostly positive rating. Call it womens intuition, an ability to spot trends, suspicious reviews on the store page. Oh and the developer directly commented on it.

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Translated:

Tell me guys, I just received this cool email here that just destroys my gamedev life today. I see what I do here. Just to let you know, because you will no longer be able to find Dininho and Jujubos on Steam.

Dojoran – Nautlander

Dojoran developer Nautlander has also commented on the situation. Dojoran had been sitting at a 94% very positive rating on Steam prior to the ban.

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Psychoduck – Nibb Studio

Probably the most blatant culprit on the list. Psychoduck held a 100% positive rating on 44 reviews at the time of banning. I decided to go in and look at some of the user reviews and found that a lot of the users had been reviewing other games on this list, and a few of them had only reviewed Psychoduck.

There are services all over the net that will review games in return for payment and keys, and they can sometimes be caught by looking at shared reviews between accounts. Of course when you have a rather mediocre game with 100% positive reviews that’s a fairly big red flag.

Puzzletronics – Alexandre Vasconcelos

Puzzletronics held a 92% very positive rating on Steam prior to its ban. A number of accounts owned only one product, that being Puzzletronics. While not conclusive of review manipulation, it does fall into trends of developers who pay for or set up fake accounts to review their own games.