https://steamcommunity.com/id/RetiredBoyo/recommended/393380/
https://steamcommunity.com/id/Enderminion11234/recommended/393380/
I bought this game ages ago and I was checking it out of curiosity to see what updates were being done and surprisingly they were still working on it and adding stuff. However it looks like a lot of devs are exploiting the fuck out of the steam stats and Valve are not bothering to clamp down on this behaviour at all because all they want to do is collect their share of the sales.
Doesn't matter if you buy a game and it's a completely fucking dead project that got spoofed by fake reviews, nope, not getting your money back on that one. We really are just scratching the surface with the level of scammy behaviour going on in the games industry. I think it's entirely possible with how bad things are we're going to see game devs going to jail for shit at some point. They are that corrupt and that's why they don't want autists who keep sleuthing around their business better than any journalists.
Steam is an exploit ridden piece of shit software.
Same shit with Amazon. That site used to be good for doing product research, but now? Most of the reviews are bought and paid for by the sellers, Amazon curates the searches, and actively promotes Chinesium garbage and knock offs. There's simply too much money involved, so over time these companies become corrupt.
Gaming is bigger than Hollywood. Steam is absolutely aware of review manipulation. At minimum, they simply don't care so long as they make money. However, it's probably worse. If people make a big enough deal about it, and force Steam to respond, we'll learn a lot more about their true motivations.
True story. In ~1998, in highschool, I was taking AP US History. We had a book report assignment where we had to go to a local university library to look up journals that had reviewed the book(s) we were assigned. Yes, this was a public highschool that had standards.
We also had to find other, non-academic reviews. I used Amazon, and I wrote something like "You have to be careful with Amazon reviews, because some of them are clearly bad faith reviews, either friends of the author or publisher or paid for reviews."
The teacher put a comment on my paper "Yes! You should always be careful to think about the source of what you are reading and WHY they are writing what they wrote."
This is what education should be like.
Amazon reviews being junk is nothing new, though I do agree the scope has gotten worse.