Indie developer COWCAT were happy to see the many warm responses after releasing their adventure game BROK the InvestiGator on Steam on August 27th.
However, after a short period of time, they felt that something strange was going on with the reviews from Steam Curators. In contrast to the mostly positive feedback from players and media, a group of Steam Curators suddenly sent massive negative reviews to the developer for no reason.
The developer then recalled that days earlier, they had received a lot of emails from scammers asking for dev keys and believed there was a connection between these two events.
A screenshot of the scammer emails to COWCAT
It’s known among indie developers that scammers usually quickly establish a "highly attractive" account by buying followers. Then, they pretend to be a Streamer, Youtuber, or Steam Curator and use reviews as a way to get game keys from developers. Afterward, they will list the keys for sale in major online gray markets for profits.
COWCAT was well aware of this practice, so to prevent fraud while not losing the connection to the real critics and reviewers, the developer would send keys to the game’s free prologue.
If the reviewers use the key themselves, they will realize the error and message the Devs, allowing working keys to be sent to legitimate people. However, as the developers expected, only two or three people asked them about the "wrong" key issue, which showed that the majority of the emails were likely from scammers.
Meanwhile, COWCAT realized that on the scammers’ side, they wouldn't realize the key errors until their customers reported that there was a problem with the key and came to question them.
As a result, the scammers in question, subject to their angry customers’ complaints, became irate and began a large-scale review bombing of COWCAT’s game.
A screenshot of COWCAT’s email to Steam
At the time of writing, COWCAT has sent Steam an email with suggestions on how Steam can take action on the whole dev key reselling issue. In his letter, he mentions that the Curators changed the reviews to positive while he was writing the email, but he has saved screenshots.
Steam hasn’t responded to his questions yet, while COWCAT’s tweets have gone viral.
Source: Twitter