Thread by @COWCATGames

BROK is currently being mass targetted by Steam curators sending negative reviews 😶

⬇️ THREAD ⬇️

Here are all the curator reviews for the game and you can notice there's a good chunk of "suspicious" negative reviews.

store.steampowered.com/curators/curat…

(1/16)

Obviously this makes no sense whatsoever.
The player reviews are 100% positive, the gaming site reviews are also excellent.

(2/16)

In addition, most of those curators had already posted a very positive review! (wish I had taken screenshots)

So what happened? Why did they turn them negative suddenly? 🤔

(3/16)

I am suspecting these are all scammers who got angry at me "for some reason" 😛

(4/16)

Here is the kind of emails I got before release.
TONS AND TONS of them.
All indie devs have to suffer through these.

(5/16)

It is very easy to figure out they are almost all scammers who attempt to steal keys from devs to resell them.
Here's a thread that explains it.
reddit.com/r/gamedev/comm…

(6/16)

Yet I don't like the idea of leaving the few LEGIT ones aside because of a massive group of FAKE ones.
So what did I do?

(7/16)

In order to separate the few legit ones to the fake ones, I started sending them free Prologue keys instead of full versions 😛

(8/16)

AFAIK for Steam keys it is impossible to distinguish them before activating the key onto an account.
So I figured the legit ones would come back to me asking why they were sent a Prologue key.

(9/16)

Very few actually did!
Confirming that most of those emails are from scammers who did not even activate those keys on their account before posting a review

(10/16)

My theory is that those scammers started selling those keys on grey sites like Kinguin, Gamivo, G2A etc and are now getting angry clients coming back at them!

(11/16)

I can't exactly prove it but I don't see any other reason my game would be the only one targetted like this. (check some of them, my game is the ONLY one with a negative review lol)

Maybe it's even one single person behind all those fake curators.

(12/16)

Those reviews are 100% fake because considering I sent them Prologue keys, they couldn't play the full game.

Yet I was surprised. Somehow, those curators were able to post reviews of the game on the full version page! (...why does Steam allow this in the first place???)

(13/16)

I have no idea if curator reviews actually have an impact on sales (probably not) but frankly I don't care.

(14/16)

However I am going to report these curators to Steam.
And I *highly* suggest some of you help by doing the same.

This is unacceptable from Steam to let those fake reviewers continue their activity of harassing indie devs for keys and doing blackmailing.

(15/16)

NEVER buy keys on grey sites, folks 🫠

Indie devs get NO MONEY AT ALL from them. They are stolen keys. You're only giving your money to leeches!

(16/16)

I believe this screenshot sums it all 🤣
"Impartial reviewer" curator, huh...

Oh! Look at what I've found in my inbox 😂

Here's that particular curator who sent the email.
BROK is the *only* game not recommended out of 204 games 🤣