I used to be a mod for an indie steam game, and I can kinda confirm this. Steam has a pretty lenient policy on what companies do to reviews, or more accurately they're under the impression "it's better to be in the center of attention even if it's bad". While I can't speak for all games, many b-tier indie ones will intentionally pay bots/companies to boost their reviews. It's not cheap (I know the game company I was with was paying about $15-20k a month to "boost" their reviews), so not all companies go for it.
Paid botting does not surprise me I have to wonder being a conspiracy theorist and pointing the old weaponised autism if there are companies not specifically investing money into buying copies with multiple of hundreds if not thousands of fake accounts to give themselves an initial boost especially in the early stages because that means they get way more attention on initial release than if they did things normally like everybody else
Hmm, do they eat the cost or try and recoup it with selling the accounts on the black market, I presume the the former since I have not heard any obvious connections of accounts changing review stance.
Well, to my knowledge the sales list is also not based on Units but on amount of value sold and DLC or just a higher value is supposed to push it higher on the list, More interesting since it would cost more atm would be concurrent users on the game.
I used to be a mod for an indie steam game, and I can kinda confirm this. Steam has a pretty lenient policy on what companies do to reviews, or more accurately they're under the impression "it's better to be in the center of attention even if it's bad". While I can't speak for all games, many b-tier indie ones will intentionally pay bots/companies to boost their reviews. It's not cheap (I know the game company I was with was paying about $15-20k a month to "boost" their reviews), so not all companies go for it.
Hmm, do they eat the cost or try and recoup it with selling the accounts on the black market, I presume the the former since I have not heard any obvious connections of accounts changing review stance.
Well, to my knowledge the sales list is also not based on Units but on amount of value sold and DLC or just a higher value is supposed to push it higher on the list, More interesting since it would cost more atm would be concurrent users on the game.