Steam developer banned for “very positive” reviews deception

Enlarge / An archived copy of Evolution EmojiThe Steam store page shows how hard it is to distinguish the developer’s name “Very Positive” from the mere summary of the “Positive” review (right).

Evolution Emoji

Here at Ars, we’ve covered Valve banning Steam game developers for everything from sex content and gratuitous UV to ill-defined “trolling”. But we’ve never seen a case where a developer has been kicked from Steam simply because of their (not forged) name.

It’s just what happened to Evolution Emoji Very Positive developer, who said on Twitter on Saturday that his developer account had been banned for “manipulating opinions”. Unlike other prominent examples of Steam user review manipulation, Very Positive has done nothing to unduly distort player-posted reviews for its games.

Instead, Very Positive exploited a quirk of the Steam store UI. This interface displays the name of the developer and publisher of a game in the same font, color, and general area as the written summary of the overall game user review summary (for example, “extremely positive ”,“ mixed ”,“ mostly negative ”, etc.) Thus, it was difficult for users to distinguish at a glance that the developer’s name“ Very positive ”was not an accurate summary of Evolution EmojiReviews from real users (which ranged from “Mixed” to “Fairly positive” according to the screenshots).

The wrong kind of attention

Simon Carless was among the first to notice this bit of deception, writing about it in his GameDiscoverCo newsletter on February 8. social media. On February 12, the developer was banned from Steam.

“I knew reviews had a huge impact on the customer’s decision,” the coder for Very Positive (who goes by the pseudonym Mike) told Vice. “I noticed that the publisher / developer’s name is located very close to the reviews and has the same color, and I decided to use it for my purposes.” Steam users, Mike said, “draw conclusions about the news by seeing familiar words and don’t spend a lot of time reading all the words.”

Mike seems to accept the ban immediately, promoting memes and jokey polls about the saga on Twitter. Even before the Steam ban, the Very Positive account tweeted, “to be honest, the name of the developer and publisher is the best thing overall Evolution Emoji project, “recognizing the simplicity in the basement of the game itself.

“I had a really bad game – that’s the only thing I’m guilty of,” Very positive brazenly tweeted Wednesday. “If making horrible games isn’t allowed on Steam, why haven’t they already suspended the CDPR account?” (Zing!)

In the end, Very Positive tried to exploit a small attention glitch in Steam’s Byzantine store system and failed in part because too many people paid attention to it. Going forward, however, we can’t help but think that a UI change on Valve’s part might be more efficient (and easier to implement) than controlling individual developer names for that. they look like “fake” summaries of reviews. Or like Twitter user DoctorWyrm said so (in a tweet retweeted by Very Positive), “Maybe Valve should fix their easy-to-use review system instead of just banning the developers.”