Steam Takes First Steps to Tackle Mass Review Manipulation

Maybe we'll even see overpriced / asset flips trashware banned in the near future, hopefully. The recent things done to battle things like that give me hope.

Thank you! 👍

sooo may steam reviewers that are just the same review for every single game
my girl/wife/dog said they would buy me beer/pc parts/stick if this gets 2000 likes/steampoints
steam awards ruined steam and are mostly used to bully people

Thank you to Sentinels of the Store for leading the way. You have made steam better for literally millions of users.

It's sad we had to wait for the FTC to start investigating and that they only cared because Valve could suffer a lawsuit if they didn't do anything.

If anyone would like to pay me for reviews just know my ethics are very loose...

Hm... Maybe they are scared of the FTC after all...

I think banning the accounts enough in one way but not in another - unless they can auto ba any new accounts made from the same IP then this is not as useful as first thought

Banning devs and games is not a solution either as we would need to know if said dev/pub had asked or in some way acquired these reviews themselves and that would be hard to note

Finally!

I believe any site with reviews is getting manipulated... I basically only read negative reviews, and assume positives may be fake/paid. But of course sometimes the negatives are fake, too, either by competitors or review-bombing.

I used to work for undisclosed multi-billion dollar consumer goods company and they did a combination of hiding negative reviews and getting paid positives. Send people free products in exchange for "honest" (nudge nudge, you wanna keep getting freebies, right?) reviews... Also, the star ratings were not true, they seeded it with an artificial number, or merged reviews for similar products so it wasn't obvious exactly which product was being rated/reviewed.