Valve is cracking down on illegal activities which have been quite rampant on the platform for quite a long time now.
Key and cosmetic reselling form a multi-million dollar ecosystem. There are several websites out there that sell keys and skins of Steam games at significantly lower prices. While some of them are harmless and great deals, many times users inadvertently fall for some scams as well. This can include anything from the reseller scamming the buyer upfront to Valve banning the keys which get redeemed because they have been acquired by illegal means. Previously, Valve had banned the reselling of Counter Strike Global Offensive skins to reduce these scams. While it did affect the CS: GO trading market significantly, Valve is going after another game this time around.
It all started with developer Cowcat’s game, Brok the InvestiGator receiving a massive influx of negative reviews. Surprised by the activity, the developers raised the issue to Valve after discovering that the reviews were fake. While anyone can claim that, the developers had in fact come up with an absolutely brilliant strategy to catch these resellers.
Ideally, curators get the full version of a game when they request a review key from a developer. But Cowcat was aware that many of them are resellers, who just post as reviewers and sell the game later on without even playing it. To solve this problem, Cowcat gave a demo key to all the curators who requested access. The real ones got back to them and got a new key issued, but the ones who sold it weren’t aware of it.
After the resellers sold the keys, the customers might have flagged the issue and consequently, these curators changed their reviews to negative on Steam. Moreover, all these accounts were created within a span of two days and had the same admin. Thankfully, Valve has taken action and banned all of these curator groups.
While the situation has been addressed, Cowcat’s entire strategy to deal with fake reviewers is worthy of praise. This should lead to other developers following suit, and adopting a similar strategy for their games as well.
