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.

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!