Start for “revision manipulations”.
A developer was fired from Steam after making an attempt to mislead users into buying their games by calling the company ‘Very Positive’.
You can probably see where this is going, but look at the Steam page of a game and you will see several prominent fields in the info panel on the right. A game’s customer rating, which is displayed in bright blue when it’s positive, is easy to spot at a glance, and it’s probably the first place many Steam users look at when opening a page. However, it is important for this story other similar information offered in the environment, in the form of developer and publisher fields.
Noticing this, a cunning, if ultimately rather naive, developer decided to take advantage of this potentially confusing proximity and list their name and publisher as very positive on the Steam page of their Emoji Evolution game. “I knew reviews had a big impact on the customer’s decision,” the developer, named Mike, told Vice. ‘I noticed that the name of the publisher / developer is very close to the reviews and has the same color, and I decided to use it for my purposes ….[Steam users] draw conclusions about information when you see familiar words and do not spend much time reading all the words “.
The abuse was first noticed by the GamesDiscoverCo newsletter, which caused Mike some notoriety, which in turn prompted him to be less than subtle about his deception on Twitter. And although Mike was initially determined, Valve would not have had a problem with his plan and told Vice, “Valve fully understands how small this trick is” – this was ultimately not the case.
With the trick of Very Positive Games, which attracted attention due to the developer’s unapproachable social media messages – the story was picked up by numerous media outlets – Fall finally falls into place. And in a tweet posted a few days ago, Mike confirmed that the company has now banned its developer account from its platform, citing “revision manipulations”.
Valve banned my developer account due to the? Revision manipulations ?. Strongly disagree with this accusation.
– Very positive developer (@verypositivedev) 13 February 2021
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Mike says he’s absolutely disagreeing[s] with this accusation “, but it seems like there’s a little more going on. GameDiscoverCo, when it first spotted Mike’s Steam page, also outlined what he believes is suspicious activity surrounding Emoji Evolution’s mysterious positives. reviews were – something that would increase Valve’s anger, with or without being woken up Very positive.