Emoji EvolutionThe Steam store page shows how difficult it is to distinguish the developer’s “Very Positive” name from the mere “Positive” review summary (on the right). “/>Emoji Evolution
Here at Ars, we discussed Valve banning Steam game developers for everything from sexual content and free ultra-violence to ill-defined ‘trolling’. But we’ve never seen a case where a developer was kicked out of Steam not just because of its (non-infringing) name.
That’s just what happened Emoji Evolution developer Very positive, what Said on Twitter on Saturday that its developer account has been banned for “revision manipulations.” However, unlike other prominent examples of Steam user rating manipulation, Very Positive did nothing to unnecessarily skew the reviews that players posted for its games.
Instead, Very Positive took advantage of the vagueness of the Steam store’s user interface. That interface displays the developer and publisher name of a game in the same font, color, and general area as the written summary of the game’s overall review of user reviews (e.g. ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’, ‘Mixed’, ‘Mostly Negative’, etc. .) It was therefore difficult for users to distinguish at a glance that the “Very Positive” developer name was not an accurate summary Emoji Evolutionactual user reviews (ranging from “Mixed” to “Mostly Positive” according to screenshots).
The wrong attention
Simon Carless was one of the first to notice this bit of deception and wrote about it in his GameDiscoverCo newsletter on February 8th. social media. By February 12, the developer of Steam was banned.
“I knew reviews had a big impact on the customer’s decision,” the coder behind Very Positive (which goes by the pseudonym Mike) told Vice. “I noticed that the name of the publisher / developer is very close to the reviews and has the same color, so I decided to use it for my own purposes.” Steam users, Mike said, “draw conclusions about information when they see familiar words and do not spend much time reading all the words.”
It looks like Mike is stepping up the ban. promotion of memes and funny polls about the saga on Twitter. Even before the steam ban, the very positive bill tweeted, “to be honest, the name of the developer and publisher is the best thing overall Emoji Evolution project, “acknowledges the bargain-cellar simplicity of the game itself.
‘I really played a bad game – that’s the only thing I’m guilty of,’ Very positive cheerfully tweeted on Wednesday. “If there can be no terrible play on Steam, why have they not already suspended the CDPR account?” (Sing!)
Eventually, Very Positive tried to take advantage of a small amount of attention in Steam’s Byzantine store system and failed in part because too many people paid attention to it. But going forward, we can not help but think that a Valve UI change could be more effective (and easier to implement) than policing individual developers’ names because they look like a ‘fake’ summary summary. Or like Twitter user DoctorWyrm put it this way (in a tweet tweeted by Very Positive), “Maybe Valve should fix their easy-to-use review system instead of just banning developers.”