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

Hit the muzzle of the gun.

In order to make the game evaluation of Steam appear objective and fair, V Society never connives at the high praise behavior on its own platform. Although in many cases the behavior of brushing high praise is not so easy to define and verify, once confirmed, the V Society has never been lenient.

The latest to hit at gunpoint is SimFabric, a Polish game developer and publisher. According to Polish media Gry-Online and PolskiGamedev, V blocked SimFabric's official Steam account on November 29, removing a total of 14 games and 18 pages released on Steam.

The preface to Cesuru: the Book of Antiquity (Cthulhu:Books of Ancients Prologue), a horror game released on November 18, was the trigger for SimFabric to annoy the V Society. According to the SteamDB database website, the game has a peak of only 14 online players, but its Steam page is filled with hundreds of reviews.

Most of the positive comments focused on November 28. The accounts that posted these reviews are new, and Curry doesn't have any other games, only the preface to Cesuru: the Book of Ancient, and the game lasts no more than an hour.

PolskiGamedev editors also found that every time a normal player posts a bad review, a number of new Steam accounts will add a favorable comment; once the positive rate reaches 70%, there will be no new favorable comments, just like some kind of algorithm. Before it was taken off the shelves on the 29th, the game's favorable rating remained at around 71%.

Interested players see this situation, it is impossible not to doubt that these comments are SimFabric's own brush. When players began to discuss the matter in the corresponding Steam community of the game, the community administrator of SimFabric overreacted as if he had asked for it. They deleted all posts about allegations of comments and blocked some players' accounts.

Disgruntled players reported these anomalies to Steam customer service one after another, and the next day V took quite thorough action. Most of the games released by SimFabric, including the trial versions of these games, have been removed by Steam, except for two games that have not yet been released, one of which is its own "Hero: flood Rescue" (HERO:Flood Rescue), and the other is "House designer" (House Designer), which is released with the US publisher PlayWay.

SimFabric is a listed company. On the day after its Steam account was blocked, the company's share price fell 18%, meaning they had to face a loss of at least 5 million Polish zloty (7.82 million yuan). As of the deadline for this article, the share price continued to fall.

SimFabric had to submit a report to the Warsaw Stock Exchange, which stated that they had received notification from V and were currently investigating the issue, "doing their best to clarify the matter and restore the operation of the Steam account in the shortest possible time".

They made the same statements on Twitter and Facebook, pointing out that they "had nothing to do with the large number of false reviews of Cthuru: ancient Book", claiming that they had "never adopted the practice of buying opinions and comments". "especially as the preface to the game is still free, we need to collect feedback from players to prepare a full version of the game based on their comments and comments."

The statement also believes that there is someone else behind the praise. SimFabric encountered a similar situation when the preface to Gardenia, a game, was released last year, when a number of well-received accounts appeared that obtained non-SimFabric game code from "third-party portals" in exchange for a favorable comment on the SimFabric game page. "the company has contacted the above platform several times to immediately delete the content and determine its source. Unfortunately, we have not received any information."

But they failed to disclose the details of the "third-party website", let alone provide a reasonable and proper explanation for the deletion of posts and the closure of accounts in the Steam community, so few Polish players believed their statement.

"you have been told about this many times in Steam and other places, but the players told are immediately banned:)"

"there are still many good people because they are willing to give money to others to do good deeds."

This article is from the official account of Wechat: game Research Society (ID:yysaag), author: Zhaoyue

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