Emoji EvolutionThe Steam store page shows how difficult it is to distinguish the developer’s “Very Positive” name from the merely “Positive” evaluation summary (right). “/>Emoji Evolution
Here at Ars, we cover Valve by banning Steam game developers for everything from sexual content and free ultraviolence to ill-defined “trolling”. But we’ve never seen a case where a developer was kicked out of Steam just because of his (non-infringing) name.
That’s just what happened to Emoji Evolution very positive developer who said on Twitter on Saturday that your developer account has been banned for “revision manipulation”. Unlike other prominent examples of manipulating Steam user reviews, Very Positive did nothing to unduly distort the reviews that players posted about their games.
Instead, Very Positive exploited a whim in the Steam store user interface. This interface displays the name of the developer and publisher of a game in the same font, color and general area as the written summary of the overall summary of the game’s user review (for example, “Extremely positive”, “Mixed”, “Mostly negative “etc.) Thus, it was difficult for users to distinguish at first glance that the developer name” Very Positive “was not an accurate summary of Emoji Evolutionactual user ratings (ranging from “Mixed” to “Most positive” according to the images).
The wrong kind of attention
Simon Carless was one of the first to notice this trick, writing about it in his GameDiscoverCo newsletter on February 8. In the days that followed, news of Very Positive’s existence and actions spread among gaming news sites and social media. On February 12, the developer was banned from Steam.
“I knew that reviews have a big impact on the customer’s decision,” the coder behind Very Positive (who goes by the alias Mike) told Vice. “I realized that the name of the publisher / developer is located very close to the comments and has the same color, and I decided to use it for my purposes.” Steam users, said Mike, “draw conclusions about information by seeing familiar words and don’t spend a lot of time reading every word.”
Mike seems to be taking the ban on sports, promoting memes and polls jokey about the saga on Twitter. Even before the Steam ban, the Very Positive account tweeted, “to be honest, the name of the Developer and Editor is the best thing ever Emoji Evolution project “, recognizing the basic simplicity of the game itself.
“I played a really bad game – that’s the only thing I’m guilty of,” Very Positive shamelessly tweeted on Wednesday. “If making horrible games is not allowed on Steam, why haven’t they suspended their CDPR account yet?” (Zing!)
In the end, Very Positive tried to exploit a minor flaw in Steam’s Byzantine storage system and failed in part because so many people paid attention to it. However, in the future, we cannot help thinking that a change in the user interface by Valve may be more effective (and easier to implement) than watching individual developer names to look like “fake” review summaries. Or how Twitter user DoctorWyrm put (in a tweet retweeted by Very Positive), “Maybe Valve should fix its easily exploitable review system instead of just banning developers.”