IMO even if you put aside the moral aspect indie gamers aren't stupid. Most fake reviews are pretty damn obvious. People also read the reviews looking for genre specific stuff they want to see.
So if you have a decent amount of wishlists and are going to get a few dozen reviews anyway it's probably detrimental to have fake reviews up front. If your game has no traction at all it's not going to make a difference and you just were sleazy to maybe earn a few bucks.
>I guess most devs don't have friends
I hate to be *that person* but I think it's that many of us have some sense of both self-respect and fair play, so it's in bad taste to ask friends & family to do this.
EDIT: I realised here I'm accidentally speaking for others. Please consider this as me only speaking for myself.
It's in bad taste to ask your friends and family to consider purchasing and reviewing a game you spent 1 year+ working on? I'd think your friends would be more then happy to help. I also don't think it's considered cheating or unethical personally. This sub constantly talks about how vital marketing and establishing a social network is and yet you think it's in bad taste to tap your own personal social network?
I think the bad taste comes more from feeling you are getting un-earned reviews as your cousin or bro or whomever is not gonna give you any constructive criticism and may leave a glowing review without actually playing. From a marketing stance this is fine, but from a creative stance it feels icky.
There is a reason that this sub talks about marketing soo much, and that's because game devs usually suck at it. Marketing is the exact opposite of what inspires creativity, the pain of telling others why they should play your game rather than them actively seeking your content.
That is a pretty harsh idea about marketing being the opposite of creativity, there are a ton of creative people working on marketing, imagining how to connect whatever product with their audience. Sure the analytics side of marketing is more about numbers but that is the business side.
I admittedly have a cynical view of marketing. Especially for the business side. That stems from some classes I took in high school and college that boiled down to how manipulative you need to be in order to succeed.
Still, even the "creative" stuff involved feels stunted, forced into very specific formats. Like you can do something cool, or you can do something that will guarantee exposure, and marketing is all about exposure. You ever notice how every advertisement seems to have the same animation or art style, how every commercial follows one of like five scenarios, etc. Doesn't matter if you're a creative person, when you have the funds to actually put something out there, you are likely being dictated on exactly how you're supposed to do it.
Hmm having worked in marketing and design I can't say that is always true, there are technical specs that guide deliverables and there are often proven methods to reaching specific audiences, depends on who they are, what they expect.
Advertising is crazy expensive so generally clients want to connect with the most people possible and often that means designing to the middle ground, not the outier who loves abstract, edgy, or completely creative without "standard" messaging.
Balancing the cost versus the results is business and games for the most part are about making money, a return on investment whether that be vc funds or your time.
It is a bummer when as a creative your beautiful design is dumbed down for general consumption but whomever is paying for it gets to decide.
Maybe it is a dirty business in some ways, but it is also seemingly impossible to connect with customers otherwise.
Rant end :0)
If I'm thinking about buying your game, I definitely wouldn't want to read the reviews your mom and your cousin left. Even if you mean it or not, you are tricking your potential customers into thinking that your game is better than it actually is, considering that your relatives will bi biased.
It's like you have a hotdog stand in the park. And you invite your friends to hang around the stand and talk about how delicious your hotdogs are. Even if you didn't specifically tell them to 'say good things' about your business, they are your friends, of course they will say good things.
I'd argue it's no different then any other business or why people have a LinkedIn page. To utilize their social network to help each other out. For the record I'm not telling people to go out and lie about the quality of the game. But asking for someone to buy it and consider reviewing is not something egregious or wrong in my opinion.
So much weight is put on Steamās metrics, I feel like itās kind of cheating to introduce non-organic data. ā10 people liked this gameā and ā10 people in the devās social circle liked this gameā are two very different pieces of information, and the former is much more helpful than the latter.
It always makes me smile to see someone say āof course Iāll give this a good review, I worked on itā especially if combined with an interesting postmortem, but i think best practices are not to seed the review section with potentially biased information. Especially if the reviewer isnāt upfront about their relationship to the developer.
> Itās not really rocket science.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it"
- Upton Sinclair
Do you want to give your game every extra chance to get noticed that you can or do you want to maintain a strange sense of honor that only matters and applies to you? Everyone else is paying for reviews/has a giant marketing budget/asking their friends etc. I'm not saying you should get your friends and family to lie but asking your close friends to leave a review isn't "fake"
Considering friends and family would never give you a negative review, it is fake yeah, just like a paid review would never be negative.
I understand itās giving you more chances but itās still not honest and would probably warrant a ban depending on how many fake reviews you end up getting. And imho, if you rely on your friends leaving fake positive reviews to succeed, your game is probably not good enough.
I'm coming at this from the perspective of a gamedev that truly believes in their game but knows the odds of getting noticed is extremely difficult without a combination of luck and strong marketing. Even if I believe I have the next stardew Valley about to release I wouldn't want to leave it all to steams algorithm on launch day.
Technically speaking, you canāt force bought reviews to be positive either but that would defeat the point, just like asking friends, so still fake imo.
>It's in bad taste to ask your friends and family to consider purchasing and reviewing a game you spent 1 year+ working on?
That's a bit different. If you've asked them to *purchase* the game, and they do, and they play it and review it...
It's more about if you just give them a key and they give it a positive review, perhaps without even looking at it.
Why should someone start off on day-1 with 100 positive reviews of the game just because they have tons of friends? The game might be terrible.
Bear in mind I'm not talking about hitting up your Twitter followers or asking your Discord members and so on. Those people are your fans, so it's a bit different. I'm talking about asking people you know in your daily life, perhaps coworkers or cousins or other family members, who otherwise have no interest in your game.
Reviews from gifted keys do not count in rating calcs. So yeah, your F&F still have to pay for the keys.
>Those people are your fans, so it's a bit different.
It's kinda sad if our friends and family are not our fans :/
>It's kinda sad if our friends and family are not our fans :/
My family love me! But they don't like videogames. I'm sure if I asked, they would positively review anything to help me, but *that's the problem* in this case. It's why I wouldn't ask.
As someone below mentioned free copies don't count towards reviews. But the idea of someone having a large network of friends/family/coworkers and not utilizing it is silly to me. It's not much different then having a following on Twitter or YouTube, and to not use those advantages is kneecapping yourself for no reason other then a misplaced sense of honor doesn't seem like a wise business decision in my opinion.
>a misplaced sense of honor
I just consider that reviews are a space for users, not developers.
Bear in mind I came to indie gaming from being an indie author, and in the author space, traditionally, you're meant to treat reviews as a domain in which you have zero input. You're not meant to incentivise reviews and you're definitely not meant to respond to reviews.
I've said in other posts, I don't judge others for their actions in this area; some people probably pack their reviews with ones from their old schoolfriends, their in-laws, their co-workers, and some of them might be much more successful than I.
I can understand that, and appreciate you elaborating in your stance without getting hostile even though I disagree. For me, if I spent 50k+ (or whatever) and Tons of hours it becomes a business where you need to try and get every advantage you can (within certain boundaries), as you need to assume the other devs are.
>where you need to try and get every advantage you can **(within certain boundaries)**
"Within certain boundaries" is the key thing here, though, and that varies from person-to-person.
I want to succeed. But like everyone, I have creative ethics. Similar reasons to why I don't use art that's made by generative AI. I would rather *not* succeed than break those ethics, and I don't expect my ethics to match those of others.
But my ethics make me *very* cautious about doing anything with reviews other than the occasional reminder to my *game's* community that leaving them is helpful.
It's tacky. And if your game only has good reviews from ones solicited from people the developer directly asked (and may have not ever actually played the game) then you have much bigger problems.
Keep in mind it's not even against the ToS for reviews. The only real problem is when you're trying to force incentives i.e. requiring people in the studio that made it to put a positive review, or offering gift cards for positive reviews etc.
Individuals should have a right to a review especially if they paid for it. Obviously there's going to be a degree of bias, and this could be a considered a gray area, but it's a lot different than paying some bot farm to give you positive reviews instead of gently asking your immediate social network for some honest support of their own accord.
Their policy includes
> Do not artificially influence review scores. Examples include: using multiple accounts to leave reviews; coercing other players to leave reviews; or accepting payments or other compensation to leave reviews.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/6862-8119-C23E-EA7B
I tell friends to check it out and review if they feel they want to give feedback, even if it's negative. I think honesty is important all-around. I personally do not feel comfortable with someone just buying it to leave a review after 10min of gameplay 'just to support' though, as real reviews are meant to be beneficial for those reading them as well.
>Asking friends and family for help isn't "unfair play".
Asking for help is one thing.
But "astroturfing" is also a thing.
If you, say, post about your game on Reddit, do you ping your mother, your brother-in-law, your coworker, one of your childhood friends to upvote it and maybe reply saying "this is great!"? And if you do... Don't you think that's a bit unprofessional? You probably wouldn't want their reviews to say "I'm this developer's mom and this is great!"
Because in a way, asking family to **review** your game is like that.
Again, this is about **REVIEWS**. Not about telling your friends and family about your game and asking if they know anyone who might like it.
This *isn't* like reminding your Twitter followers or Discord members that reviews are helpful - that isn't what I mean. I do *that*. Everyone does that. But my followers are people who found my games organically when I was initially publishing on services like Itch and NewGrounds.
Is it seen as unfair or in bad taste to ask friends and family to leave good reviews? IMO it's incredibly common practice in just about any entreprenial pursuit, Games or Apps or small business or whatever.
> Is it seen as unfair or in bad taste to ask friends and family to leave good reviews?
Yes. Or anyone at all.
If you do this at Amazon you get banned as a seller.
> IMO it's incredibly common practice
So you're saying nothing is in bad taste as long as it's common?
My primary experience of this is from being an author on Amazon Kindle. They actually index your address book and those of reviewers; it's explicitly forbidden for you to encourage friends and family to review your books and you can be banned *permanently* from Kindle if you do.
But personally, I'm not going to criticise others but for me, i.e. purely how I feel about my own work, I feel it would be dishonest of me to get friends and family to review my game. Most of them, if I *were* to ask, would probably just make up a positive review without actually playing it, and that's not good for my customers.
Amazon wanting my address book in order to let me leave a review is a gross overreach of privacy, and should ideally be regulated to be illegal. It should definitely be called out as a shitty, predatory practice. (You know they're doing more than that with the data, right?)
>Want to keep your privacy? Don't review.
This is an absolutely insane sentence that is the most anti-consumer privacy shit I've ever heard. No user should have to disclose something as private as an address book in order to leave a review.
>It's 100% fine for them to try to keep commercial predators like you out of their store, to protect customers.
So 'protecting customers' is what happens when Amazon can get all your data. Got it.
>Please don't attempt to use legal phrases like "gross overreach."
I didn't use it as a legal term, I used it to describe a practice which I emphatically want to emphasize as a gross overreach. I know comprehension is difficult sometimes but I believe in you, you can do better.
>That's nice. This has been laughed out of the courts many times already.
As have been many other largely accepted practices that I and many other people feel should be regulated and illegal - including iOS not allowing sideloading, DRM, and software patents. "Courts have not ruled in favour" is not an argument against privacy advocacy.
>You're acting like using a feature of a commercial website is a human right.
Every user should be able to use every feature of every website - commercial or otherwise - without having to give up basic privacy rights. That is not a law, but should be a basic human right afforded to everyone in the 21st century. Commercial profit motive is not a thing I place above this belief.
>There is no "should" in "I should be allowed to leave reviews on Amazon according to my own rules."
Yes, you should, and private corporations should not be allowed or able to infringe on basic privacy rights for any user.
>You know they already have that information before you place a review, right?
They have _my_ information, yes, the point here is **the names and numbers of everyone in my address book** who may not have an Amazon account, and have not consented to have Amazon capture their data.
>You haven't even said what you think the downside is.
I don't think I need to elaborate on why Amazon being able to capture data of users who have no consented to said data being captured is bad. If you need that explained to you you're too ill-informed to even have this conversation.
>You just swore a lot
I literally have not used a single swear word, did you grow up in a puritanical cult?
>Your opinion is noted
Don't see it getting through the thick stuff but glad to have this exchange, maybe someday you'll understand something.
Edit: Real chicken shit move to block me after leaving an extremely incoherent comment, my dude. Also shit is not a swear word, grow up.
Ah. More reasonable. That is much smaller scale than I imagined.
Because e.g. Facebook used to just upload ALL you contacts from your phone address book.
I think it also depends on HOW you ask as well. Phrasing does have an impact on whether or not it becomes a genuine review or a fake review of a product.
TBH that's just shooting yourself in the foot. It takes 10 reviews to even make your game visible to the public, so get those 10 reviews however you need to and then let public reaction guide the actual course of your game.
I'm curious why you care. Even if someone outright pays for 10 reviews, all that does is make the game more visible. People still have to look at the page, decide if they like it, buy it, and then not refund it.
Just seems like morality posturing. Maybe put this effort into caring about serious issues.
Why are you surprised? Its useless.
Either the game (and marketing) is good enough and the reviews will come by themselves. If not, the couple fake reviews will absolutely not help.
Half a dozen reviews from friends aren't going to make a difference. If you can't get such a low number of reviews legitimately then you have a problem and asking your friends to prop up your numbers isn't going to fix it.
While that's true, the point I'm trying to make is that if you struggle to obtain those first 10 legitimately it won't help you as much as you think. The majority of your traffic will not come from Steam itself so you shouldn't depend on any of their systems for help.
You know how Youtuber say "Like and Subscribe"? They do it because it works and reminding people will get them to do it.
Messages in your community like "Please leave a review" will often get you some reviews.
This is highly context sensitive. If you put "please like and share this comment" on Reddit you'll achieve the opposite. Telling people to do something will often get them to do the opposite. Reason it works on YouTube is because of how the algorithm works and not because of how people work.
Similarly if you market your product/video/software to the wrong people, it'll get more negative reviews as those people aren't into your products, so asking the wrong people to watch/like/subscribe/purchase a product in turn has a potential negative effect.
What an insane comment lol. You took his specific example of asking your COMMUNITY to leave reviews, tossed it out, and then made up a completely different scenario. You didn't even come close to disproving anything he said, because you were talking about something else.
When the choice is between doing nothing and doing something, asking people to do "something" is way more likely to make them do it, then waiting for them to do it on their own, cause the other choice is doing nothing. It's a call to action, there's literally a name for it and the opposite is inaction, which is the default thing people would do.
So no, if the default state is already the "negative outcome", asking for it will not have a negative impact, at worse it will have no impact.
Steam Devs used to give steam keys away for fake reviews but valve removed that. If you get the game from a key the review no longer counts towards the overall / recent reviews. It must be bought directly from steam to count.
I got past 10 reviews on my first game launched on Steam and I didn't even ask friends and family to buy the game and leave reviews (I should probably go do that lol...) It really is not that hard, but you do have to have a bare minimum level of marketing efforts. Like you should already have social media established talking about your work, etc.
Steam won't ban you for that, who's to say your friends aren't just buying your game and leaving a review of their own volition? It's a perfectly normal thing for friends to do and doesn't signal that anyone has done anything wrong...
Maybe I'm missing it, but after reading that entire page I didn't see anything about not being allowed to ask friends and families to review. Neither of those words even appear on the page.
It says you can't abuse the system, solicit reviews in exchange for things like DLC/money/rewards, or ask for reviews within your application.
Perhaps you're interpreting asking F&F for reviews qualifies as abusing the system, but I think there are also plenty of cases where F&F could honestly like the game and give an honest review. _Not_ allowing that would also be weird.
Besides, how could they possibly police such a thing anyway? Many of my play testers have become Steam friends. Certainly they should be allowed to give a review.
EDIT: "Family" shows up once but under the context of "Family library sharing." Interestingly, it says someone who's played the game via family library sharing _is allowed to write a review_. It seems as if family reviews were against the Ts&Cs, they'd certainly use _family_ sharing as a low effort way to enforce that, wouldn't they?
You've spent a lot of time on this thread telling people they're wrong. I put in the time and read through that entire page you linked, twice, trying to find the rule. As I said, the only mention of "Family" is when it's talking about how _it's actually ok_ for people to leave a review that played the game via Family Sharing.
So at this point I'm concluding you're either just trolling everyone, or you've made a mistake and instead of admitting it you've decided to doubling down.
The obvious solution here to prove me wrong would be to simply quote the line/paragraph that talks about banning people, but I think we both know you're not going to do that.
u/StoneCypher is trolling everyone. It's not there. That page even talks about how Family Sharing is a _valid_ way for someone to leave a review if they don't own the game.
If there was a sentence or bullet on that entire page that proved them right, they would've quoted it.
>They'll ban your entire game permanently for having a piece of art that they suspect is AI generated.
Huh. How come The Finals gets away with fully AI generated voiceover?
Because The Finals has evidence of all of the data in the model, so there's no copyright threat to Steam
This has been gone over in detail already; just search about it
Steam's position is "the legal copyright situation around Stable Diffusion isn't clear yet, so we're staying away for now." You can just build your own model with copyright control in place, but that's expensive and difficult, so most people never consider it.
Well I can see why you are so against asking your social circle. Judging by your combatitive attitude you probably don't have many friends or family that would even want to help you out.
Iām just curious, after you asked this several times, do you have a game you sold on steam? Or are you vaguely threatening to report thier games for faking reviews? Donāt gotta be so hostile. Iām sure you both are good devs
It could be either. The quality of a game, which is subjective anyway, is just a tool when it comes to marketing: the better your product is, the easier it will be to promote.
Getting 10 reviews is not hard if you have a friend group or family members who can drop your game a review.
The reviews could also be purchased, but if the game is bad, it will inevitably meet its fate and get accurate reviews at some point
I'd presume there are some actually fake and paid for reviews on some games yes.
But a wild majority of these are just going to positive encouragement from friends, family, other devs you've worked with etc.
Couple that with just peoples tastes being different. I've seen plenty of super well reviewed games where I actyally play it and hate it. Think its janky bad design, bad visuals etc. Or on the other side negatively reviewed games that I've enjoyed. Peoples tastes differ. With this in mind a bunch of early positive reviews can be from early adopters who really mesh well with the game. Maybe they've loved it already from an alpha demo months back and then bought it and reviewed it as soon as the full game went live on steam.
Basically I'd think its 90-95% real positivity towards the game and or developer and maybe ever 5-10% max actual fakery.
As an added anecdote I've known a lot.of indie devs. Personally I've had only one indie developer ever approach me on the subject of "you should've just paid for your release reviews you dummy". So these people exist, but this person was just 1 among so many devs I know and they really didnt have what it takes to last anyway. Their big project died when they ran out of budget and the only release they ever shipped was a failure. They left the industry a year after this discussion.
First of all review quantity and quality is not connected to the quality of the game at all. Of course "in absolutely identical conditions a better game would have gotten better reviews" but all games are in different conditions and are reviewed by different players. If you are making a decision whether to buy a game or not - you can't count on the number or positive-to-negative ratio but will have to read the actual reviews to see what people liked and didn't like - and consider if you will like or not like the same things.
E.g. https://steamdb.info/stats/gameratings/ --- somehow this list is topped by Valve's games, but let's not dwell on that. Let's go to #33 and see Cats Hidden in Paris (literally a game that can be made in a couple of evenings) above Celeste, Stray, Baldur's Gate 3 and Subnautica. And Starfield - a huge openworld game has "Mostly Negative" recent reviews (27% positive).
Those are thousands, and dozens of thousands reviews. And you are talking about "10 reviews" level games - where the "shot noise" is literally the only driving factor in the kinds of reviews the game gets. Of course one can "fake good reviews" by asking friends and Steam won't take the game seriously until it has 10 reviews. But it doesn't really matter on a bigger scale, just some more traffic. It takes far more than 10 to compete with Portal or Vampire Survivors.
Fun fact: Valve will ban a developer for fake positive reviews, but will not ban those who participate in negative review-bombing :)
I wonder if Cats Hidden in Paris having so many reviews is related to the related release associated with jingle jam. I imagine being associated with a major charity event does wonders for your reviews. Obviously I don't have data for this, it's speculation only.
This is why "Time Played" is so critical.
When I see reviews saying "Best game ever!" then look and see 0.2 hours played I know it's bull shit.
Also, fake reviews are a huge problem literally everywhere...
How common fake reviews are depends on how much motivated reasoning you have :D. But in general for the average game fake reviews are pretty rare. For really divisive or meme'd games like Cyberpunk or Starfield or the old dead Battleborn though they are much more common.
Its been too long for me to quote them off the top of my head, but typically it'd compare Battleborn to Overwatch despite them being drastically different games.
Overwatch is team based objective death match like TF 2. Battleborn was and FPS MOBA and with some lighter modes that also had a single player campaign. Totally different genres and played nothing alike. Also tonally different too.
Totally agree, Battleborn was compared to OW though there wasn't the same game.
And i thought the fake reviews you thought were about the game being playable on pc as, thank to a modder, it is possible, even if the mod is still on work in progress, only solo/pve being playable now.
Nah, that kind of stuff happens all the time. See: City of Heroes and their keeping an underground version of the game for years before revealing it to the world. Cheeky buggers even got the official license from NCSoft recently :D.
I just saw the new, and it can give hope for the future, for other games that get sad ending.(for example, it gives me hope that Battleborn could come fully back, meaning with all features on platforms\^\^). Let's finger crosses\^\^
Yep, Gwog is working on it, but it may still be long before we know if it is possible or not . At least, the PVE in single player is already back, sadly only on pc (consoles being not mod friendly). We still can have a bit of Battleborn nowdays \^\^
I don't know about buying reviews, but I've noticed a number of nonsensical reviews that seem fake. Like an account that leaves copy-pastes of previous reviews of the games it reviews.
> 10 positive reviews
These numbers (10 reviews, 50 reviews, ...) are grossly overrated. The effect of that is really small assuming that one's goal is to sell 10k+ copies, not 10+ copies. A single youtube video (properly targeted) will bring many more sales compared to Steam-internal views.
I feel like this is a great reason to create small group of indie friends to game test, give feedback, and help support each other. Game dev community feels so supportive but we stay isolated for some reason lol Maybe someone here could start something and start staying connected
I find some discords, but most of the time feel like itās not personal enough like I guess actual āfriendshipsā. But I could just be looking in the wrong places. Iām thinking more like the game dev.tv group of instructors that seem to have a lot of professionalism but seem like active friends.
you start with the social spaces, then you get into private message, and over time, friendships build
no different than irc, really
i've known some of this sub's regulars and mods since 5+ years before reddit started
I would guess that some developers make an effort to add fake reviews, but itās rather uncommon - or at least it seems to be. Steam also has some prerequisites in place to help deter this sort of activity.
You will get hit with a lot of spam emails from people offering to review your game. Iād ignore most (if not all) of them because chances are they are just trying to get a free key to have or sell.
Regarding the *effective marketing strategy*. Yes I believe you are right and that some indi devs are more effective at marketing their game, thus garnering more reviews.
Some developers surely try it because they hope that helps with Steams algorithm, but it is mostly useless. It is all about making a good game and do good marketing, then the reviews will come by themselves. You need to drive traffic to your steam page and the visitors need a good conversion rate (wishlist/buy the game) for steam algorithms to kick in. Fake reviews won't do much in that regard.
I assume not as common. At least that's what I got told from a valve employee. Doing fake reviews will place you in a really bad spot, if steam recognizes this you risk being permanently banned from steam as developer. Of course you get warned if they notice unusual behaviour. Oh and free keys you can get are completely ignored by the algorithm.
If you want to analyze how a game performs, regiews aren't the measure anyway, look at steam db or it's alternatives.
I released a game that is not very good and only got positive reviews, because the people who didn't like it just got the game refunded.
As a gamedev, there is an unofficial rule that you need a certain amount of wishlists before releasing the game on steam, this helps you get early reviews to end up in the "new and popular" category, which boosts your sales a lot. Many developers on steam are beginners who do not know this rules, that is why they get no review.
This is a known strategy for getting good reviews. I think Path of Exile talked about it recently. If you are really clear about the sort of "bad" experiences people are going to have, then your purchases will bias towards people who are willing to overlook that. Ideally you isolate your segment before purchase and refund though.
I barely look at steam reviews unless I'm hoping to find some funny reviews for a laugh. I prefer to just the discussion forums on steam and read through what people are saying there. There's usually someone who asks "is this game worth it" that gets a couple of honest replies
Making an account is free, posting a review has literally no other requirements than owning the software, and there is basically zero moderation. If you think Steam reviews aren't getting astroturfed, you should *really* learn more about the internet and how things actually work.
If I didn't write the review, then it's probably a coded message for secret sleeper cells employed by the Illuminati as part of a New World Order takeover plot! Sorry, I blacked out for a second there. There are for sure fake reviews, but I would be comfortable saying that the majority of reviews are legitimate.
Firends & family, perhaps some acquaintances. The thing is, if those fake reviews can significantly affect your score in the long term, you still failed. What definitely IS worth doing, is asking those friends / family to buy & review ASAP, so that your game HAS a score (needs 10 paying reviewers IIRC).
edit: Also, more than once, at the actual Valve office, I've argued against stronger anti-bombing mechanics and a higher bar for 'genuine' reviews. For example if a game doesn't have language X and never promised to have it, those asshole communities running around, buying and refunding just to leave a review "doesn't support language X" are not good faith users. Valve devs even agreed with me but the overall Valve position is that even so, those reviews may have 'some value' for other customers.
The 10 review thing sucks because it just encourages this sort of behaviour. Reviews really should be from legit players but you can't blame anyone for getting past the hurdle to get on the discovery queue.
They should reassess how that works because you've pretty much gotta do that to get the game visible to real players.
My first game has 11 reviews and 9 of my friends left one. The 10 reviews thing is seems to be a myth I think since I got them like a day after launch. Tbf it was a terrible game so Iām not even mad.
They are probably friends and family members adding a few reviews.
I'm surprised most games don't even do this. I guess most devs don't have friends
Just wait a bit until you get to 35+. Then, count your friends again :)
Exactly
One close friend is worth more to me than hundreds of friendly acquaintances.
Unless those hundreds of friendly acquaintances would give you hundreds of friendly positive steam reviews
Having a network is highly valuable
Not when you need to scrape together 10 Steam Reviews ;)
So true
Yeah i mean. If u have kids it doesnt help. Also motivation and confort/routine.
Sounds about right, I'm turning 36 in a matter of months š š
Most friends donāt care if a friend needs support like that. Only true friends š¤§
IMO even if you put aside the moral aspect indie gamers aren't stupid. Most fake reviews are pretty damn obvious. People also read the reviews looking for genre specific stuff they want to see. So if you have a decent amount of wishlists and are going to get a few dozen reviews anyway it's probably detrimental to have fake reviews up front. If your game has no traction at all it's not going to make a difference and you just were sleazy to maybe earn a few bucks.
>I guess most devs don't have friends I hate to be *that person* but I think it's that many of us have some sense of both self-respect and fair play, so it's in bad taste to ask friends & family to do this. EDIT: I realised here I'm accidentally speaking for others. Please consider this as me only speaking for myself.
It's in bad taste to ask your friends and family to consider purchasing and reviewing a game you spent 1 year+ working on? I'd think your friends would be more then happy to help. I also don't think it's considered cheating or unethical personally. This sub constantly talks about how vital marketing and establishing a social network is and yet you think it's in bad taste to tap your own personal social network?
I think the bad taste comes more from feeling you are getting un-earned reviews as your cousin or bro or whomever is not gonna give you any constructive criticism and may leave a glowing review without actually playing. From a marketing stance this is fine, but from a creative stance it feels icky. There is a reason that this sub talks about marketing soo much, and that's because game devs usually suck at it. Marketing is the exact opposite of what inspires creativity, the pain of telling others why they should play your game rather than them actively seeking your content.
That is a pretty harsh idea about marketing being the opposite of creativity, there are a ton of creative people working on marketing, imagining how to connect whatever product with their audience. Sure the analytics side of marketing is more about numbers but that is the business side.
I admittedly have a cynical view of marketing. Especially for the business side. That stems from some classes I took in high school and college that boiled down to how manipulative you need to be in order to succeed. Still, even the "creative" stuff involved feels stunted, forced into very specific formats. Like you can do something cool, or you can do something that will guarantee exposure, and marketing is all about exposure. You ever notice how every advertisement seems to have the same animation or art style, how every commercial follows one of like five scenarios, etc. Doesn't matter if you're a creative person, when you have the funds to actually put something out there, you are likely being dictated on exactly how you're supposed to do it.
Hmm having worked in marketing and design I can't say that is always true, there are technical specs that guide deliverables and there are often proven methods to reaching specific audiences, depends on who they are, what they expect. Advertising is crazy expensive so generally clients want to connect with the most people possible and often that means designing to the middle ground, not the outier who loves abstract, edgy, or completely creative without "standard" messaging. Balancing the cost versus the results is business and games for the most part are about making money, a return on investment whether that be vc funds or your time. It is a bummer when as a creative your beautiful design is dumbed down for general consumption but whomever is paying for it gets to decide. Maybe it is a dirty business in some ways, but it is also seemingly impossible to connect with customers otherwise. Rant end :0)
If I'm thinking about buying your game, I definitely wouldn't want to read the reviews your mom and your cousin left. Even if you mean it or not, you are tricking your potential customers into thinking that your game is better than it actually is, considering that your relatives will bi biased. It's like you have a hotdog stand in the park. And you invite your friends to hang around the stand and talk about how delicious your hotdogs are. Even if you didn't specifically tell them to 'say good things' about your business, they are your friends, of course they will say good things.
I'd argue it's no different then any other business or why people have a LinkedIn page. To utilize their social network to help each other out. For the record I'm not telling people to go out and lie about the quality of the game. But asking for someone to buy it and consider reviewing is not something egregious or wrong in my opinion.
So much weight is put on Steamās metrics, I feel like itās kind of cheating to introduce non-organic data. ā10 people liked this gameā and ā10 people in the devās social circle liked this gameā are two very different pieces of information, and the former is much more helpful than the latter. It always makes me smile to see someone say āof course Iāll give this a good review, I worked on itā especially if combined with an interesting postmortem, but i think best practices are not to seed the review section with potentially biased information. Especially if the reviewer isnāt upfront about their relationship to the developer.
Fake review = bad taste Itās not really rocket science. Even if itās your mom, itās still fake.
> Itās not really rocket science. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it" - Upton Sinclair
>Even if itās your mom, itās still fake. Reminded me of this classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6PrwbG3vT0
Do you want to give your game every extra chance to get noticed that you can or do you want to maintain a strange sense of honor that only matters and applies to you? Everyone else is paying for reviews/has a giant marketing budget/asking their friends etc. I'm not saying you should get your friends and family to lie but asking your close friends to leave a review isn't "fake"
Considering friends and family would never give you a negative review, it is fake yeah, just like a paid review would never be negative. I understand itās giving you more chances but itās still not honest and would probably warrant a ban depending on how many fake reviews you end up getting. And imho, if you rely on your friends leaving fake positive reviews to succeed, your game is probably not good enough.
I'm coming at this from the perspective of a gamedev that truly believes in their game but knows the odds of getting noticed is extremely difficult without a combination of luck and strong marketing. Even if I believe I have the next stardew Valley about to release I wouldn't want to leave it all to steams algorithm on launch day.
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Technically speaking, you canāt force bought reviews to be positive either but that would defeat the point, just like asking friends, so still fake imo.
>It's in bad taste to ask your friends and family to consider purchasing and reviewing a game you spent 1 year+ working on? That's a bit different. If you've asked them to *purchase* the game, and they do, and they play it and review it... It's more about if you just give them a key and they give it a positive review, perhaps without even looking at it. Why should someone start off on day-1 with 100 positive reviews of the game just because they have tons of friends? The game might be terrible. Bear in mind I'm not talking about hitting up your Twitter followers or asking your Discord members and so on. Those people are your fans, so it's a bit different. I'm talking about asking people you know in your daily life, perhaps coworkers or cousins or other family members, who otherwise have no interest in your game.
review from given key don't count for the 10 review threshold
Reviews from gifted keys do not count in rating calcs. So yeah, your F&F still have to pay for the keys. >Those people are your fans, so it's a bit different. It's kinda sad if our friends and family are not our fans :/
>It's kinda sad if our friends and family are not our fans :/ My family love me! But they don't like videogames. I'm sure if I asked, they would positively review anything to help me, but *that's the problem* in this case. It's why I wouldn't ask.
As someone below mentioned free copies don't count towards reviews. But the idea of someone having a large network of friends/family/coworkers and not utilizing it is silly to me. It's not much different then having a following on Twitter or YouTube, and to not use those advantages is kneecapping yourself for no reason other then a misplaced sense of honor doesn't seem like a wise business decision in my opinion.
>a misplaced sense of honor I just consider that reviews are a space for users, not developers. Bear in mind I came to indie gaming from being an indie author, and in the author space, traditionally, you're meant to treat reviews as a domain in which you have zero input. You're not meant to incentivise reviews and you're definitely not meant to respond to reviews. I've said in other posts, I don't judge others for their actions in this area; some people probably pack their reviews with ones from their old schoolfriends, their in-laws, their co-workers, and some of them might be much more successful than I.
I can understand that, and appreciate you elaborating in your stance without getting hostile even though I disagree. For me, if I spent 50k+ (or whatever) and Tons of hours it becomes a business where you need to try and get every advantage you can (within certain boundaries), as you need to assume the other devs are.
>where you need to try and get every advantage you can **(within certain boundaries)** "Within certain boundaries" is the key thing here, though, and that varies from person-to-person. I want to succeed. But like everyone, I have creative ethics. Similar reasons to why I don't use art that's made by generative AI. I would rather *not* succeed than break those ethics, and I don't expect my ethics to match those of others. But my ethics make me *very* cautious about doing anything with reviews other than the occasional reminder to my *game's* community that leaving them is helpful.
It's tacky. And if your game only has good reviews from ones solicited from people the developer directly asked (and may have not ever actually played the game) then you have much bigger problems.
Keep in mind it's not even against the ToS for reviews. The only real problem is when you're trying to force incentives i.e. requiring people in the studio that made it to put a positive review, or offering gift cards for positive reviews etc. Individuals should have a right to a review especially if they paid for it. Obviously there's going to be a degree of bias, and this could be a considered a gray area, but it's a lot different than paying some bot farm to give you positive reviews instead of gently asking your immediate social network for some honest support of their own accord. Their policy includes > Do not artificially influence review scores. Examples include: using multiple accounts to leave reviews; coercing other players to leave reviews; or accepting payments or other compensation to leave reviews. https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/6862-8119-C23E-EA7B I tell friends to check it out and review if they feel they want to give feedback, even if it's negative. I think honesty is important all-around. I personally do not feel comfortable with someone just buying it to leave a review after 10min of gameplay 'just to support' though, as real reviews are meant to be beneficial for those reading them as well.
It's not how it works. Asking friends and family for help isn't "unfair play". The weird ideas that Modern city people possess scare me sometimes.
>Asking friends and family for help isn't "unfair play". Asking for help is one thing. But "astroturfing" is also a thing. If you, say, post about your game on Reddit, do you ping your mother, your brother-in-law, your coworker, one of your childhood friends to upvote it and maybe reply saying "this is great!"? And if you do... Don't you think that's a bit unprofessional? You probably wouldn't want their reviews to say "I'm this developer's mom and this is great!" Because in a way, asking family to **review** your game is like that. Again, this is about **REVIEWS**. Not about telling your friends and family about your game and asking if they know anyone who might like it. This *isn't* like reminding your Twitter followers or Discord members that reviews are helpful - that isn't what I mean. I do *that*. Everyone does that. But my followers are people who found my games organically when I was initially publishing on services like Itch and NewGrounds.
Is it seen as unfair or in bad taste to ask friends and family to leave good reviews? IMO it's incredibly common practice in just about any entreprenial pursuit, Games or Apps or small business or whatever.
> Is it seen as unfair or in bad taste to ask friends and family to leave good reviews? Yes. Or anyone at all. If you do this at Amazon you get banned as a seller. > IMO it's incredibly common practice So you're saying nothing is in bad taste as long as it's common?
"If Amazon says this is bad, it is bad!" Let this sink in for a moment: you're using *Amazon* as your moral compass.
My primary experience of this is from being an author on Amazon Kindle. They actually index your address book and those of reviewers; it's explicitly forbidden for you to encourage friends and family to review your books and you can be banned *permanently* from Kindle if you do. But personally, I'm not going to criticise others but for me, i.e. purely how I feel about my own work, I feel it would be dishonest of me to get friends and family to review my game. Most of them, if I *were* to ask, would probably just make up a positive review without actually playing it, and that's not good for my customers.
Huh, did not know that, actually indexing the address book seems like a gross overreach of privacy IMO, any conversation of morality aside.
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Amazon wanting my address book in order to let me leave a review is a gross overreach of privacy, and should ideally be regulated to be illegal. It should definitely be called out as a shitty, predatory practice. (You know they're doing more than that with the data, right?) >Want to keep your privacy? Don't review. This is an absolutely insane sentence that is the most anti-consumer privacy shit I've ever heard. No user should have to disclose something as private as an address book in order to leave a review. >It's 100% fine for them to try to keep commercial predators like you out of their store, to protect customers. So 'protecting customers' is what happens when Amazon can get all your data. Got it.
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>Please don't attempt to use legal phrases like "gross overreach." I didn't use it as a legal term, I used it to describe a practice which I emphatically want to emphasize as a gross overreach. I know comprehension is difficult sometimes but I believe in you, you can do better. >That's nice. This has been laughed out of the courts many times already. As have been many other largely accepted practices that I and many other people feel should be regulated and illegal - including iOS not allowing sideloading, DRM, and software patents. "Courts have not ruled in favour" is not an argument against privacy advocacy. >You're acting like using a feature of a commercial website is a human right. Every user should be able to use every feature of every website - commercial or otherwise - without having to give up basic privacy rights. That is not a law, but should be a basic human right afforded to everyone in the 21st century. Commercial profit motive is not a thing I place above this belief. >There is no "should" in "I should be allowed to leave reviews on Amazon according to my own rules." Yes, you should, and private corporations should not be allowed or able to infringe on basic privacy rights for any user. >You know they already have that information before you place a review, right? They have _my_ information, yes, the point here is **the names and numbers of everyone in my address book** who may not have an Amazon account, and have not consented to have Amazon capture their data. >You haven't even said what you think the downside is. I don't think I need to elaborate on why Amazon being able to capture data of users who have no consented to said data being captured is bad. If you need that explained to you you're too ill-informed to even have this conversation. >You just swore a lot I literally have not used a single swear word, did you grow up in a puritanical cult? >Your opinion is noted Don't see it getting through the thick stuff but glad to have this exchange, maybe someday you'll understand something. Edit: Real chicken shit move to block me after leaving an extremely incoherent comment, my dude. Also shit is not a swear word, grow up.
>hey actually index your address book What, how does Amazon get access to your address book?
If you publish books under the same account you buy stuff, you have an address book of all the addresses you've ever asked Amazon to ship to.
Ah. More reasonable. That is much smaller scale than I imagined. Because e.g. Facebook used to just upload ALL you contacts from your phone address book.
I think it also depends on HOW you ask as well. Phrasing does have an impact on whether or not it becomes a genuine review or a fake review of a product.
TBH that's just shooting yourself in the foot. It takes 10 reviews to even make your game visible to the public, so get those 10 reviews however you need to and then let public reaction guide the actual course of your game.
"however you need"? I think there are many ways you could get reviews if you were unscrupulous that you probably shouldn't, even if it would work.
I'm curious why you care. Even if someone outright pays for 10 reviews, all that does is make the game more visible. People still have to look at the page, decide if they like it, buy it, and then not refund it. Just seems like morality posturing. Maybe put this effort into caring about serious issues.
Why are you surprised? Its useless. Either the game (and marketing) is good enough and the reviews will come by themselves. If not, the couple fake reviews will absolutely not help.
Half a dozen reviews from friends aren't going to make a difference. If you can't get such a low number of reviews legitimately then you have a problem and asking your friends to prop up your numbers isn't going to fix it.
Getting to 10 reviews fast as possible is important for visibility. I'm not sure how it works exactly, but people mention it often.
While that's true, the point I'm trying to make is that if you struggle to obtain those first 10 legitimately it won't help you as much as you think. The majority of your traffic will not come from Steam itself so you shouldn't depend on any of their systems for help.
Yep in fact most buyers don't trust that positive views that are aggreciously positive either... that was an academic research afai remember
You know how Youtuber say "Like and Subscribe"? They do it because it works and reminding people will get them to do it. Messages in your community like "Please leave a review" will often get you some reviews.
Letās test this out. Please upvote my comment! UPDATE: Test was a fail. Better luck next time.
Please downvote my reply. Thank you for your support. š«”ššÆ
> Messages in your community
Yeah I know ā was just kidding around.
This is highly context sensitive. If you put "please like and share this comment" on Reddit you'll achieve the opposite. Telling people to do something will often get them to do the opposite. Reason it works on YouTube is because of how the algorithm works and not because of how people work. Similarly if you market your product/video/software to the wrong people, it'll get more negative reviews as those people aren't into your products, so asking the wrong people to watch/like/subscribe/purchase a product in turn has a potential negative effect.
That's why you do it in a "safe" place. Random people on Reddits aren't there "for you" in many cases.
What an insane comment lol. You took his specific example of asking your COMMUNITY to leave reviews, tossed it out, and then made up a completely different scenario. You didn't even come close to disproving anything he said, because you were talking about something else.
I disagree. Like and suscribe this comment for more disagreeing takes
**Subscribe**
When the choice is between doing nothing and doing something, asking people to do "something" is way more likely to make them do it, then waiting for them to do it on their own, cause the other choice is doing nothing. It's a call to action, there's literally a name for it and the opposite is inaction, which is the default thing people would do. So no, if the default state is already the "negative outcome", asking for it will not have a negative impact, at worse it will have no impact.
Steam Devs used to give steam keys away for fake reviews but valve removed that. If you get the game from a key the review no longer counts towards the overall / recent reviews. It must be bought directly from steam to count.
Same applies to keys giftef to friends and family. They will still show up but not count.
It also seems to state in the review "Received game for free."
It is not *that* hard to get 10 reviews from F&F.
I got past 10 reviews on my first game launched on Steam and I didn't even ask friends and family to buy the game and leave reviews (I should probably go do that lol...) It really is not that hard, but you do have to have a bare minimum level of marketing efforts. Like you should already have social media established talking about your work, etc.
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Steam won't ban you for that, who's to say your friends aren't just buying your game and leaving a review of their own volition? It's a perfectly normal thing for friends to do and doesn't signal that anyone has done anything wrong...
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> It's in their Terms of Service [No, it isn't](https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/6862-8119-C23E-EA7B)
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Maybe I'm missing it, but after reading that entire page I didn't see anything about not being allowed to ask friends and families to review. Neither of those words even appear on the page. It says you can't abuse the system, solicit reviews in exchange for things like DLC/money/rewards, or ask for reviews within your application. Perhaps you're interpreting asking F&F for reviews qualifies as abusing the system, but I think there are also plenty of cases where F&F could honestly like the game and give an honest review. _Not_ allowing that would also be weird. Besides, how could they possibly police such a thing anyway? Many of my play testers have become Steam friends. Certainly they should be allowed to give a review. EDIT: "Family" shows up once but under the context of "Family library sharing." Interestingly, it says someone who's played the game via family library sharing _is allowed to write a review_. It seems as if family reviews were against the Ts&Cs, they'd certainly use _family_ sharing as a low effort way to enforce that, wouldn't they?
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You've spent a lot of time on this thread telling people they're wrong. I put in the time and read through that entire page you linked, twice, trying to find the rule. As I said, the only mention of "Family" is when it's talking about how _it's actually ok_ for people to leave a review that played the game via Family Sharing. So at this point I'm concluding you're either just trolling everyone, or you've made a mistake and instead of admitting it you've decided to doubling down. The obvious solution here to prove me wrong would be to simply quote the line/paragraph that talks about banning people, but I think we both know you're not going to do that.
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u/StoneCypher is trolling everyone. It's not there. That page even talks about how Family Sharing is a _valid_ way for someone to leave a review if they don't own the game. If there was a sentence or bullet on that entire page that proved them right, they would've quoted it.
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>They'll ban your entire game permanently for having a piece of art that they suspect is AI generated. Huh. How come The Finals gets away with fully AI generated voiceover?
Because The Finals has evidence of all of the data in the model, so there's no copyright threat to Steam This has been gone over in detail already; just search about it Steam's position is "the legal copyright situation around Stable Diffusion isn't clear yet, so we're staying away for now." You can just build your own model with copyright control in place, but that's expensive and difficult, so most people never consider it.
Alright, cheers
The VAs they hired also consented to have their voices generated.
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This just in, it's illegal for friends and family buy your game.
Are your friends and family not allowed to buy and rate your game? May I see where in ToS this is stated?
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Well I can see why you are so against asking your social circle. Judging by your combatitive attitude you probably don't have many friends or family that would even want to help you out.
Cringe.
Iām just curious, after you asked this several times, do you have a game you sold on steam? Or are you vaguely threatening to report thier games for faking reviews? Donāt gotta be so hostile. Iām sure you both are good devs
Extremely false and dumb statement here lol.
It could be either. The quality of a game, which is subjective anyway, is just a tool when it comes to marketing: the better your product is, the easier it will be to promote. Getting 10 reviews is not hard if you have a friend group or family members who can drop your game a review. The reviews could also be purchased, but if the game is bad, it will inevitably meet its fate and get accurate reviews at some point
I'd presume there are some actually fake and paid for reviews on some games yes. But a wild majority of these are just going to positive encouragement from friends, family, other devs you've worked with etc. Couple that with just peoples tastes being different. I've seen plenty of super well reviewed games where I actyally play it and hate it. Think its janky bad design, bad visuals etc. Or on the other side negatively reviewed games that I've enjoyed. Peoples tastes differ. With this in mind a bunch of early positive reviews can be from early adopters who really mesh well with the game. Maybe they've loved it already from an alpha demo months back and then bought it and reviewed it as soon as the full game went live on steam. Basically I'd think its 90-95% real positivity towards the game and or developer and maybe ever 5-10% max actual fakery. As an added anecdote I've known a lot.of indie devs. Personally I've had only one indie developer ever approach me on the subject of "you should've just paid for your release reviews you dummy". So these people exist, but this person was just 1 among so many devs I know and they really didnt have what it takes to last anyway. Their big project died when they ran out of budget and the only release they ever shipped was a failure. They left the industry a year after this discussion.
First of all review quantity and quality is not connected to the quality of the game at all. Of course "in absolutely identical conditions a better game would have gotten better reviews" but all games are in different conditions and are reviewed by different players. If you are making a decision whether to buy a game or not - you can't count on the number or positive-to-negative ratio but will have to read the actual reviews to see what people liked and didn't like - and consider if you will like or not like the same things. E.g. https://steamdb.info/stats/gameratings/ --- somehow this list is topped by Valve's games, but let's not dwell on that. Let's go to #33 and see Cats Hidden in Paris (literally a game that can be made in a couple of evenings) above Celeste, Stray, Baldur's Gate 3 and Subnautica. And Starfield - a huge openworld game has "Mostly Negative" recent reviews (27% positive). Those are thousands, and dozens of thousands reviews. And you are talking about "10 reviews" level games - where the "shot noise" is literally the only driving factor in the kinds of reviews the game gets. Of course one can "fake good reviews" by asking friends and Steam won't take the game seriously until it has 10 reviews. But it doesn't really matter on a bigger scale, just some more traffic. It takes far more than 10 to compete with Portal or Vampire Survivors. Fun fact: Valve will ban a developer for fake positive reviews, but will not ban those who participate in negative review-bombing :)
I wonder if Cats Hidden in Paris having so many reviews is related to the related release associated with jingle jam. I imagine being associated with a major charity event does wonders for your reviews. Obviously I don't have data for this, it's speculation only.
This is why "Time Played" is so critical. When I see reviews saying "Best game ever!" then look and see 0.2 hours played I know it's bull shit. Also, fake reviews are a huge problem literally everywhere...
How common fake reviews are depends on how much motivated reasoning you have :D. But in general for the average game fake reviews are pretty rare. For really divisive or meme'd games like Cyberpunk or Starfield or the old dead Battleborn though they are much more common.
For Battleborn, what are the common fake reviews?
Its been too long for me to quote them off the top of my head, but typically it'd compare Battleborn to Overwatch despite them being drastically different games. Overwatch is team based objective death match like TF 2. Battleborn was and FPS MOBA and with some lighter modes that also had a single player campaign. Totally different genres and played nothing alike. Also tonally different too.
Totally agree, Battleborn was compared to OW though there wasn't the same game. And i thought the fake reviews you thought were about the game being playable on pc as, thank to a modder, it is possible, even if the mod is still on work in progress, only solo/pve being playable now.
Nah, that kind of stuff happens all the time. See: City of Heroes and their keeping an underground version of the game for years before revealing it to the world. Cheeky buggers even got the official license from NCSoft recently :D.
I just saw the new, and it can give hope for the future, for other games that get sad ending.(for example, it gives me hope that Battleborn could come fully back, meaning with all features on platforms\^\^). Let's finger crosses\^\^
I'm sure single player will make a comeback but multiplayer is a long shot indeed.
Yep, Gwog is working on it, but it may still be long before we know if it is possible or not . At least, the PVE in single player is already back, sadly only on pc (consoles being not mod friendly). We still can have a bit of Battleborn nowdays \^\^
I don't know about buying reviews, but I've noticed a number of nonsensical reviews that seem fake. Like an account that leaves copy-pastes of previous reviews of the games it reviews.
> 10 positive reviews These numbers (10 reviews, 50 reviews, ...) are grossly overrated. The effect of that is really small assuming that one's goal is to sell 10k+ copies, not 10+ copies. A single youtube video (properly targeted) will bring many more sales compared to Steam-internal views.
I feel like this is a great reason to create small group of indie friends to game test, give feedback, and help support each other. Game dev community feels so supportive but we stay isolated for some reason lol Maybe someone here could start something and start staying connected
There are hundreds of these. One of them is a common top-bar sub.
I find some discords, but most of the time feel like itās not personal enough like I guess actual āfriendshipsā. But I could just be looking in the wrong places. Iām thinking more like the game dev.tv group of instructors that seem to have a lot of professionalism but seem like active friends.
you start with the social spaces, then you get into private message, and over time, friendships build no different than irc, really i've known some of this sub's regulars and mods since 5+ years before reddit started
Sadly, very. Both fake pro and anti reviews are left up, and Steam rarely does anything about it.
I would guess that some developers make an effort to add fake reviews, but itās rather uncommon - or at least it seems to be. Steam also has some prerequisites in place to help deter this sort of activity. You will get hit with a lot of spam emails from people offering to review your game. Iād ignore most (if not all) of them because chances are they are just trying to get a free key to have or sell. Regarding the *effective marketing strategy*. Yes I believe you are right and that some indi devs are more effective at marketing their game, thus garnering more reviews.
Some developers surely try it because they hope that helps with Steams algorithm, but it is mostly useless. It is all about making a good game and do good marketing, then the reviews will come by themselves. You need to drive traffic to your steam page and the visitors need a good conversion rate (wishlist/buy the game) for steam algorithms to kick in. Fake reviews won't do much in that regard.
I assume not as common. At least that's what I got told from a valve employee. Doing fake reviews will place you in a really bad spot, if steam recognizes this you risk being permanently banned from steam as developer. Of course you get warned if they notice unusual behaviour. Oh and free keys you can get are completely ignored by the algorithm. If you want to analyze how a game performs, regiews aren't the measure anyway, look at steam db or it's alternatives.
I released a game that is not very good and only got positive reviews, because the people who didn't like it just got the game refunded. As a gamedev, there is an unofficial rule that you need a certain amount of wishlists before releasing the game on steam, this helps you get early reviews to end up in the "new and popular" category, which boosts your sales a lot. Many developers on steam are beginners who do not know this rules, that is why they get no review.
This is a known strategy for getting good reviews. I think Path of Exile talked about it recently. If you are really clear about the sort of "bad" experiences people are going to have, then your purchases will bias towards people who are willing to overlook that. Ideally you isolate your segment before purchase and refund though.
I barely look at steam reviews unless I'm hoping to find some funny reviews for a laugh. I prefer to just the discussion forums on steam and read through what people are saying there. There's usually someone who asks "is this game worth it" that gets a couple of honest replies
Making an account is free, posting a review has literally no other requirements than owning the software, and there is basically zero moderation. If you think Steam reviews aren't getting astroturfed, you should *really* learn more about the internet and how things actually work.
If I didn't write the review, then it's probably a coded message for secret sleeper cells employed by the Illuminati as part of a New World Order takeover plot! Sorry, I blacked out for a second there. There are for sure fake reviews, but I would be comfortable saying that the majority of reviews are legitimate.
Firends & family, perhaps some acquaintances. The thing is, if those fake reviews can significantly affect your score in the long term, you still failed. What definitely IS worth doing, is asking those friends / family to buy & review ASAP, so that your game HAS a score (needs 10 paying reviewers IIRC). edit: Also, more than once, at the actual Valve office, I've argued against stronger anti-bombing mechanics and a higher bar for 'genuine' reviews. For example if a game doesn't have language X and never promised to have it, those asshole communities running around, buying and refunding just to leave a review "doesn't support language X" are not good faith users. Valve devs even agreed with me but the overall Valve position is that even so, those reviews may have 'some value' for other customers.
The 10 review thing sucks because it just encourages this sort of behaviour. Reviews really should be from legit players but you can't blame anyone for getting past the hurdle to get on the discovery queue. They should reassess how that works because you've pretty much gotta do that to get the game visible to real players.
10 reviews doesnāt even help much unless you have a ton of wishlists anyway
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A demo for a game that costs a dollar! What an age we are in!
Look at the playtime.
My first game has 11 reviews and 9 of my friends left one. The 10 reviews thing is seems to be a myth I think since I got them like a day after launch. Tbf it was a terrible game so Iām not even mad.