Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Crocodile Detective Broger is a click-and-adventure game that hit Steam on August 27.

Like most good independent games on Steam, its cartoon style is interesting, its playing style is not obviously hard to hurt, and it is also cheap and good-after a discount of more than 60 yuan, you can enjoy a 20-hour game experience, including a large number of multi-line plots and branch endings.

From the evaluation of the game, players also agree with this. In the three days after being on the shelves, Crocodile Detective got more than 100 reviews, with a praise rate of 99%.

But it is such a "harmless" game that received a lot of bad reviews on the second day after the game was launched. These bad reviews come not from players, but from connoisseurs on Steam, the characters that occupy an important page in the game recommendation interface.

Players familiar with Steam should know that the Steam connoisseur community is like a player guild in the Steam community, dividing them into different groups according to their preferences and preferences, and marking a large number of new games with recommended or not recommended tags for reference by players who follow them.

These reviews will not be counted in the data of player reviews, but will appear in more obvious places, such as the Steam home page, or a separate display bar on the game page, with their text comments attached, all in all, it looks like a VIP comment booth.

Connoisseur recommendations that often appear on the home page of ▲ Steam

But for developers, the roles played by Steam connoisseurs are more complex.

On the one hand, they are the KOL in the community, who can endorse their game products so that more players can accept the exposure of the game; on the other hand, they influence the public opinion of the game to a certain extent, especially for very small independent developers, the trend of comments of connoisseurs may determine the life and death of the game.

The developer of "Crocodile Detective Broger" was the victim of the connoisseur system. A day after the game was launched, the developer couldn't stand it. On Twitter, the developer revealed to the players the chaos behind the connoisseurs-not only did a large number of private developers ask for game activation codes, but also put these activation codes on the website for sale at a clear price. If the developers do not follow, then they are waiting for a lot of bad reviews of the game.

According to the developer, before "Crocodile Detective Broger" was launched, his developer's email was full of emails from Steam connoisseurs asking him for key, hundreds of them every day, far more than the number of games sold.

As a developer, he naturally welcomes real KOL people to campaign for the game and willingly provide them with game trials, but at the same time, in the face of a flood of applications, he vaguely feels that something is wrong.

Because in most cases, these connoisseurs or game anchors don't have to identify themselves in an email, and even if they bring a link to a YOUTUBE account, it doesn't seem to prove that it's the sender-who knows if someone is using another KOL account to ask for an activation code?

So the developer took a small test: give them the activation code for the game, but the activation code can only play the preface of the game. In other words, until the Key is actually activated, the reviewers cannot determine whether it is really playable or not.

For those connoisseurs who really want to evaluate the game, they will probably ask why in email again after they find that there is something wrong with the activation code, while the connoisseurs who act as second-tier traders may not know that they have got the incomplete activation code until the activation code has been sold and the customer has given feedback.

After several tests, the Crocodile Detective Broger developer found that very few players responded to activation code questions in their emails. At the same time, my game has received a lot of bad reviews from Steam connoisseurs, mostly vague comments that "the game is not polished in all aspects", but these accounts have already given the game "recommended" reviews.

His email also began to receive provocative emails from connoisseurs:

▲ "now you know why you have so many bad reviews from connoisseurs."

At the same time, a large number of "Crocodile Detective Broger" activation code purchase links have appeared on some less legal websites at much lower prices than those officially sold on Steam, and many of these independent games are being sold at low-cost activation codes.

Although there is no hard evidence, the confusion of Crocodile Detective Broger developers is not purely guess. after all, independent game developers have shared emails on Reddit months ago asking for activation codes and giving advice: most of those emails are liars.

The developer sorted out some emails claiming to be YOUTUBE video bloggers and found that they had a lot in common: they all had over 3000 followers, each video had a steady 1, 000 to 2, 000 views, publishers never turned on their microphones or cameras (considering that game bloggers appear on YOUTUBE is normal), and their game content is highly repetitive.

Based on this suspicion, some players also checked the Steam connoisseur account that changed the bad rating for Crocodile Detective Broger, and the result was similar: these accounts were all registered on about the same day, and only one or two games were rated poorly, and the number of fans on the account was not much different, about 23000, and almost all came from the same manager account-- that is to say, These so-called "big V" may all be the same person under the skin.

You know, there is almost no threshold for registering a Steam connoisseur. It is similar to Douban's group or an interest group, where everyone can join or sign up for their own team of connoisseurs, while Steam connoisseurs have another privilege to give the game good or bad reviews and show their reviews in a conspicuous place, even if they don't have the game in their library.

For independent developers who are weak, no matter how small the negative comments are, they are likely to undo years of hard work. The same is true of the developer of Crocodile Detective Broger, who quit his steady job six years ago because of his dream of making a game and devoted himself to game development for six years. He not only localized the game in more than a dozen languages, but also added a live voice to each character-enough to show how hard an independent game developer is working on his game.

You can also see this expectant enthusiasm for your children coming online on the developer's Twitter:

▲ developers release the countdown to the launch every day and cherish every player's evaluation.

In most cases, an unknown independent game can only get a few hundred reviews from players, because it is good, cheap and full, and the praise is quite objective-- usually about 85%. Under the premise that the sample base is not high, a representative bad review is fatal: this means that it may attract hundreds of bad reviews affected by the evaluation at the same time, which will instantly reverse the rave reviews.

▲ "Crocodile Detective Broger" is the only "not recommended" of the 204games on a connoisseur account.

The occurrence of this situation is naturally due to the lack of Steam supervision. In fact, for the communication between developers and connoisseurs, Steam does open the Curator Connect channel, making it easy for developers to check the quality and standard of connoisseurs themselves before authorizing the trial, but unfortunately, the channel only supports 100 communications-- which is negligible for a large number of connoisseurs, which promotes the birth of email communication practice of asking for activation codes.

In the face of the high weight of connoisseurs themselves, Steam does not limit whether it needs to own or pass customs games to evaluate, nor does it make any effective punishment for "malicious comments", so that today, there is even a bad situation of "if you don't give me Key, I'll give you bad reviews", so that for developers, an authentic and objective evaluation of connoisseurs has become a bit extravagant.

▲, "this commentator really played the game."

Up to now, probably under the pressure of public opinion on the Internet, the above-mentioned connoisseurs have quickly changed their bad reviews into favorable ones, and their comments are completely contrary to those previously published, saying that the quality of the game is good and the characters are very deep. It also gives a high score of 9max 10.

Crocodile Detective Broger has also filed a complaint with Steam based on the above evidence, calling on V Society to take good care of its platform and open more reliable communication portals for developers and connoisseurs.

A few hours later, Steam blocked the accounts of connoisseurs with malicious bad reviews.

Dramatically, in the adventure game Crocodile Detective Broger, players can choose "outsmart" and "violent" paths to investigate the case, which will lead to a completely different outcome.

In this confrontation with the bad guys in reality, it is this kind of "violence" that is good at finding abnormal "wisdom" and the courage to disclose the truth, which ultimately protects the interests of all independent game developers. From the point of view of the developer of Crocodile Detective Broger, the advocacy process itself may be enough to make an adventure story.

This article is from the official account of Wechat: game Research Society (ID:yysaag), by Harry Quinn.

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