Initialized for “revision manipulations”.
A developer was kicked out of Steam after a blatant attempt to trick users into buying his games, naming his company Very Positive.
You can probably already see where this is going, but look at a game’s Steam page and you’ll see several prominent fields in the info panel on the right. A game’s customer rating, displayed in bright blue if positive, is easy to spot at first glance, and is likely to be the first place many Steam users look for when opening a page. Crucially to this story, however, there are some other similarly presented information nearby, in the form of developer and publisher fields.
Realizing this, a devious developer, although quite naive, decided to explore this potentially confusing proximity, listing his name and editor as Very Positive on the Steam Emoji Evolution game page. “I knew that reviews have a big impact on the customer’s decision,” said the developer, using the name Mike, to Vice, “I realized that the name of the publisher / developer is located very close to the reviews and has the same color, and i decided to use it for my purposes ….[Steam users] draw conclusions about information when you see familiar words and don’t waste a lot of time reading all the words “.
The ploy was first discovered by the GamesDiscoverCo newsletter, earning Mike a degree of infamy, which in turn led him to be less than subtle about his Twitter fraud. And while Mike was initially adamant, Valve would have no problem with his scheme – saying to Vice: “Valve perfectly understands how insignificant this trick is” – in the end that was not the case.
With the Very Positive Games ploy attracting more and more attention as a result of the developer’s blatant social media posts – the story was released by various media outlets – Valve ended up interfering. tweet posted several days ago, Mike confirmed that the company has already banned its developer account from its platform, citing “revision manipulations”.
Did Valve ban my developer account due to? Revision manipulations? I absolutely disagree with this accusation.
– Very positive developer (@verypositivedev) February 13, 2021
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Mike says he “totally disagrees[s] with this accusation, “but it looks like there may be a little more action. GameDiscoverCo, when it first identified Mike’s hijinks on the Steam page, also detailed what it believed to be suspicious activity around the Emoji’s mysteriously positive reviews Evolution – something that would increase Valve’s ire, with or without the Very Positive placed in a bold manner.