It's about ethics in user reviews - how to get a positive Steam critique of your game for $5

Eh, not surprised. At all.

Pfff. Sad.
Thanks for the interesting article.

Copied from my comment on the article;

Honestly I dont see why this is a surprise, or really an issue. I'm sure this will not be a popular opinion, but reviewers across all sorts of platforms, for software, hardware, clothing lines etc, all have incentive to provide good reviews. Here's why, the average reviewer recieves his copy of the game, or piece of hardware etc gratis, the same as these fiver reviewers. No company that you continually provide bad reviews for will keep you on their mailing list for new product.

Does that mean every review everywhere is biased? No, but it means a majority are, even if they arent glowing 5 star reviews, no one wants to bite the hand that is feeding it, and since reviews are a matter of personal opinion, its easy to defend a 3star review on a 1 star product just by saying, its my genre, or I love this kind of gadget.

I dunno, I just dont know why anyone would be surprised.

Like jbond, not surprised at all...
I knew about this for a long time and it's inevitable with a system like Steam ^_^

Where can I sign up? I could use the $$$.

Also, doesn't bother me, it's the negative reviews I read. I wanna know whats WRONG not whats RIGHT.

Can't say I'm surprised. There are so many people in this world that have no principles and are willing to do anything for money. And there are people who have no problem with paying those people to accomplish their goals.

This doesn't really affect me though so i don't care. I mostly read negative reviews and when I do read positive reviews I read those that are written by people who put a lot of hours into the game.

Terrible article, people will offer to do all sorts of things on fiverr - but it doesn't mean people are paying for it, and only a very stupid developer/publisher would for over $5 for a review. There are services that will do it for a fraction of that; besides, they can give out as many keys as they like since it costs them nothing.

Maybe steam needs to raise the threshold of the number of reviews to get positive rating on a game, if there're more and more fake reviews coming. Steam removed all the reviews on one of the games that were rumored to have given keys for the reviews recently, so at least it's not things they're unaware of.

Oh, that reminds me. Does that GamerGate thingy is still a thing?

I hope the youtube-bait developers that seem to flourish on Steam nowadays don't do the same thing to gather their terrible "herp derp 10/10 IGN" reviews.

Like MarineSloth, not surprised at all...

I'm joining "not surprised" crowd on that. I haven't met a review system yet where fake/bought reviews wouldn't be a problem. It's just something I always bear (pun not intended) in mind while reading reviews online. Still, I'm pretty disgusted when I see e.g. psychiatrists who do that.

Like entropia said, not surprised at all...