Steam reviews aren't participation trophies.

Sturgeon's Law. "Ninety percent of everything is crap". Derived from a quote by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, who once said, "Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud."

Steam has over 100,000 games in the catalog. Is every one of these a sparkling gem? Or are 90% of them crud?

Not all games are equal. Some are much better than the rest, and many are much, much worse.

Let's sort the wheat from the chaff. Do you deserve only the best?

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POPULAR DISCUSSIONS

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RECENT ANNOUNCEMENTS

Sentinels Of The Store Uncovers HUGE Russian Fake Review Racket

22 April - Obey the Fist! | 0 Comments

https://steamproxy.net/groups/Sentinels_of_the_Store/announcements/detail/4222762959836264571

Sentinels of the Store and their allies embarked on a clandestine operation to infiltrate a fake Russian review consortium, revealing information about how much reviewers are paid for fake reviews, the terms and conditions of their employment, the revelations are eye opening and their announcement is worth reading.

Largely this confirms much of what we already knew or suspected.

Asset flippers and review manipulators mostly go hand-in-hand.

Fake reviewers seed their review history with "genuine" red herring reviews that are unpaid to throw people off the scent... so unless a game has multiple fake reviews, it may just be misfortune for the developer to get a free fake review.

Fake reviewers must buy the game up front, write the review, then they get re-imbursed for the game purchase price + roughly 50c worth of roubles for their hard work. Which may not seem like much but there's very little effort involved and some of these reviewers have written thousands of fake reviews.

Kudos to Sentinels of the Store and hopefully this will cause Valve to wake up and take notice of what's been happening right under their noses... perhaps finally the reports of review manipulation might get actioned after all.

Great news! Russian asset flipper banned!

5 March - Obey the Fist! | 1 Comments

It's a great day today, as Valve have been busy this week finally delivering justice. Over the last two days, over 290 asset flips and minimum effort GameMaker Studio/Construct 2 template games have been banned from Steam. The games belonged to the following "group" of Russian "developers".

Reforged Group
For Kids
HotFoodGames
Bullid Games
Garage Games
Vyacheslav Shilikhin
Mikhail Melnikov
SosiskaGames
Rex Junior
Luci Entertainment
IndieLip
Seaborgium Entertainment
Sweety Boy
galesoozka
Gales Corp.
ImperiumGame
OnBlind
Interactive Pixel Entmt.
Fedor Iko
Repa Games
TSS Studio

Many of the games are flips of exactly the same game template assets and share similar art and so on. Given Valve have chosen to ban these developers all at the same time, we can only conclude our suspicions have been correct and these are all either the same person or a small number of bad actors who've been acting together to pollute Steam for profit.

Certainly, we know that Reforged Group/Gales Corp/HotFoodGames/ImperiumGame/Garage Games are all one and the same as we've seen games move between those Steam developer accounts. It's interesting to see how far the rot spread before Valve finally ended it.

Here's to a much nicer, cleaner Steam Store for everyone!

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STEAM CURATOR

Sturgeon's Law reviews

"Sturgeon said "90% of everything is crap!". Does this apply to Steam games too? We're going to find out if lazy shovelware padding out game bundles is close to as good as fully developed AAA blockbusters."

Here are a few recent reviews by Sturgeon's Law

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5 Comments

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Ned Kelly 30 Jan, 2023 @ 9:32am

I just found the Roger Ebert of PC gaming

Gwynoak 9 Dec, 2022 @ 1:30pm

I have been browsing the owner of this groups hoard of reviews for a few days. He came up in a subreddit for game development because people thought he was a troll farm. Not only do I wonder what the guy does for a living, but I also wonder why he doesnt make these rapid fire reviews into a video series. He posts 3 or 4 reviews a day, and honestly he should just do a video a week going through thse same comments but for 20 some off games.

I also came here to say his lufthausers review sucks. Otherwise these are entertaining.