I know I've ranted many a time about steam before but with the absolute review bombing I'm seeing happening to most studios across the board it's very curious how these games that clearly no one damn likes keep bumping their way up to the top sellers list. I check out the top sellers list quite often just to see what's trending in the industry because it's usually a decent benchmark.
The fact that the positive reviews are always gibberish on these games as well make me deeply suspicious. Is it really the normies being normies? Or are even they sick of the state of the games industry constantly releasing broken game titles and is there some major shenanigans going on? I bring up the steam reviews so often because even in the comments pages people think they're bots and such. I mean don't get me wrong, normies are really really dumb, but I think even they'd be pissed off after awhile if they kept on pre-ordering broken products. I'm thinking of games like Pharaoh Total War which no one asked for somehow getting to the top sellers list.
If any indie developer did this they'd be called on it and wiped out and by the way I know that devs fuck with their review sections on steam all the time.
I know for a fact based on my experiments you can get it to happen for free depending because of stuff like trading cards which yes people trade each other money for for some reason. There's also other methods as well that aren't necessarily nefarious like key packs and so on, those methods I don't mind so much but reviewers are potentially getting the game for free with the pack and leaving reviews on 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.
This is why I consider even platforms like Itch to be way more valuable, it's not worth botting on those kinds of sites so you're more likely to get feedback from real human beings.
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.
I don't have concrete proof but even steam commenters have been pointing out how suspicious a lot of these reviews are. I was wondering why so many of them were just accounts reposting dumb memes but this seems way too plausible for my liking.
Could well be that like a lot of big sites and platforms, Valve is simply sitting pretty and don't care because they make so much money. The whole fakeness of users reminds me a lot of dating sites when I took a look at them, same tactics. I see games like Rainbow Six Siege for example regularly getting in the top sellers list but it does beg the question given how allegedly broken it all is now according to users who is playing this sort of game?
I can at least put two and two together on the F2P garbage because it's clearly bot accounts gaming the system so weirdos can collect their shinies so it makes me wonder about another situation at play here.
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.