A few days ago, one of the developers, Cowcat, who released their game Brok the InvestiGator on Steam started a social media discussion where he took on the “scamming curators” about how they tried to get free codes and sell them on gray sites.
The point was, they were first giving good reviews and getting codes in order to sell them on external sites but developer Cowcat noticed that some of them were not really “genuine” curators. After testing some of them with some “prologue codes” for reviews, they noticed that some of the reviews suddenly turned to negative after the sellers noticed that their customers were bombing them back due to prologue codes.
After this “review revenge” strategy was revealed by Cowcat in social media, a lot of gamers shared the related threads around and Valve took notice. While the curators also acted quick to revert the negative reviews, proof taken by Cowcat was found sufficient by Valve and almost 20 of such curators were immediately banned. Many gamers reacted to this decision positively as some curators are indeed not providing genuine opinions but just some fabricated copy-paste texts to get themselves followers and keys.
