Are these overpriced games being created to farm CV on SG? (Update: games being reduced to 0 CV)

https://www.steamgifts.com/game/Jnapa/abandoned-dark and https://www.steamgifts.com/game/xEaqs/do-not-smile are zeroed already, however https://www.steamgifts.com/game/6VZtF/dos-plan is just reduced for some reason

I think almost all of them are complete junk though. They look decent because I think a lot of them are created from those developer kit demo things that give you a base game to build off of and that is what you see in the trailer. The people releasing these fake games just change a few skins and keep releasing the same thing under new names. I have also seen some that are actual mobile games and they are just stolen and re-uploaded to Steam under a different name.

They always have 10 fake positive reviews when they are listed and then once any real reviews come in, you can read about how horrible the games are. They are often just shells of a game with no content.

Thanks for the report but all are 0 CV already.
You can tell by going to https://www.steamgifts.com/app/<app id> and checking if there's a date next to "No Value".

I know these two aren't 0'd out yet
https://www.steamgifts.com/game/GaVnY/angry-choice
https://www.steamgifts.com/game/l04kk/aloneguy

Some of them were already on my list as full CV under a different publisher name. I'll add the rest.

Looks like support has updated a few of them but they didn't give all games the same treatment. No idea why.

Alone and Dangerous Full -> 0 CV
Angry Choice Full -> Reduced CV

Since those are questions/suggestions for the site admin and this thread is driven by users, it's probably best to make your own thread in the Bugs/Suggestions forum.

I have never ran a group and I am only in 1 where I need to maintain a ratio, so I have never had to deal with these issues or really put any thought into it.

I think all the values you see when you view the list of users in a group should be changed to show real CV instead of the retail values. I think this would probably fix most issues. It seems like it would be an easy change since the site already calculates real CV on user profiles, but I don't know anything about programming or creating websites, so I could be wrong about it being an easy change.

Doubly notable for being blatant ripoffs of actually decent games in the genre by Devcats. Not even just "inspired" like Laush Studios claims, but they're very nearly 1 to 1 duplicates with worse art. If Devcats had the money, I imagine they'd sue over it.

That probably won't get reduced because I think it is just an overpriced bad game. It seems like the person that made it doesn't really know much about making games and they are trying to sell it for way too much money. If cheap keys aren't available, people cannot use it to abuse the CV system here. From reading the comments on the giveaway, it sounds like the giveaway creator might be giving away a beta key that probably won't even work.

The type of games that get reduced here are the ones that are actually fake and people are using to abuse the CV system. They are not made to be played, they are made for some kind of fraud. The dev/publisher usually pumps out a lot of games in a short time that are all just reskinned versions of the same thing or stolen mobile games. They originally release them at a low price with 10 fake positive reviews and make keys available for pennies on shady sites. Then they bump the price up really high to something like $50 or $200 and people here grab the almost free keys to get tons of CV. These games have their CV removed to try and prevent people from cheating the CV system.

doing that would hit way to many innocent games in the goal of hitting a small amount of abuse cases.
not a good solution

I wouldn't want to take away CV from all features limited games, but it would be useful if they created some kind of automated flagging system that looked for games that meet a certain criteria and then flagged them for support to look at. Anytime a game shows up in the Steam API that is features limited and over a certain price, it could flag that for manual review from support.

They could also flag any game that has a price increase of more than 50 or 100% since a lot of these fake games will start at like $2 and then later increase their price to something around $20-200. That type of massive price increase is a clear indicator of something wrong and should immediately throw up red flags for SG support to look at the game. Most games on Steam go down in price over time, not up, and if they do go up, it would not be by such a massive amount, so that should be a clear indicator and help support identify the games much quicker.

Beat me to it. That first one was $0.99 until last month. Definitely qualifies

Games won't have their CV reduced just because they are bad. The ones in this thread are being reduced because they are priced very high and keys are made available almost for free, which allows users here to abuse the CV system. The games talked about in this thread are very poor quality because whoever is creating them is not creating them to be played, it is for some kind of fraud, but that is not the main reason for having their CV removed.

I'm not sure what's going on with that game. Maybe they had their account hacked. It's no longer for sale though.

Valve really needs to close down the Pandora's Box and actually start to review games before publishing.

That definitely sound like it could be why they are created. It's not to do what happened recently, to list fake games and then change their names to popular games because these overpriced fake games have existed for years without that happening. But maybe it is for the other reason he mentioned, to put fake positive reviews on the games and raise the prices so that they can sell them in packs of Steam keys and claim they are selling highly rated games with a certain value. People don't realize they are buying fake junk until it is too late and will have a hard time getting a refund because the key packs are probably sold on shady sites.

I am happy this recent high profile scam happened because it looks like it kicked Steam into gear to look into the issue and maybe they will do something to identify all of these type of games and not just the ones that pretend to be popular games. Maybe they will identify and wipe out all of the games talked about in this thread and put some kind of protection in place to stop new ones from being listed on Steam and we can finally be done with this issue on SG.

Interesting, I'd never thought of that, but makes sense. Also registering "GTA 6", "Elden Ring 2" is future-proofing for a scam in the next 3-5 years. These scammers look ahead more than Valve ever did. Valve needs to change "we have a contract and can trust our partners" attitude to "these certain fields need approval to change" mentality.

You can add from the same editor and same price :

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2709230/Planes_Combat/

This has zero CV since Oct 4, 2023.