Valve says it's 'really easy' to spot devs manipulating reviews, bans them 'all the time'

Valve bans developers manipulating reviews "all the time", and the practice is "really easy to spot", according to Tom Giardino, who works on the Steam Business team.

Giardino's comments came in response to Cliff Harris, the founder of Gratuitous Space Battles developer Positech Games, who warned on Thursday that online review systems were "fundamentally broken". Developers could illegally buy hundreds of copies of their own game "through shills" and then artificially boost its review score, he said on Twitter.

"I would never do this, but I'm not sure everyone is as honest. In all products/stores (not just Steam), review scores cannot be taken seriously without some heavy duty verification they are not shills."

In response, Giardino said that not only is review manipulation easy to spot, even if developers post the fake reviews over a long time period, but it's also not effective at boosting sales.

Valve has banned multiple developers for review manipulation over the past few months, including Acram Digital and Insel Games.

Thanks, Gamasutra.

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Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.