Valve Targets Fake Steam Reviews, List Of 427 Affected Games Revealed

Valve has finally made a move on fake reviews on its digital PC game retailer Steam. Now, all the games that were reviewed using methods that the company considers dubious will lose those reviews. This will inevitably affect that game’s standing as well as its sales.

As Tech Radar notes, reviews play a huge role in driving up sales for games at Steam. Games with a lot of reviews, with most of them being positive tend to perform well, which then allows the developers to make more games. With this being the case, it’s only to be expected that a few select game makers would resort to trying to game the system with fake reviews in order to artificially raise their games’ appeal.

Many of these reviews are obvious at first glance, usually because of the suspiciously high praise with absolutely no record of actual playtime, or at least not enough to justify what they were writing. However, Valve’s method of finding these fake reviews involves something more substantial; i.e. Steam keys.

The company explained via blog post that Steam keys are becoming a huge factor in their fight to ensure that game reviews are going to be relevant and honest. This was reportedly based on the research they have done so far.

"The majority of review score manipulation we're seeing by developers is through the process of giving out Steam keys to their game, which are then used to generate positive reviews," the post reads.

To find out exactly which games and developers are affected by these sweeping changes the most, Sergey Galyonkin, the developer of Steam Spy looked into the matter and published a list via Twitter. According to Galyonkin, he tracked the “userscores” of games before and after the updates were released.

It would seem the title to suffer the worst damage is “Simple Ball: Extended Edition,” which lost 74 points in scores, according to Steam Spy’s spreadsheet. Some developers also lost as much as 97 percent of their reviews.