It's Time for Real Change

A Nearly 100 Review Bot Network Uncovered...And It's Operated by a Banned Steam Developer

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3066970/Taxi_Goldmania/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3067070/Beachgirl_Dreams/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3067080/Jessica_Deliverson/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3067330/Defense_of_the_Sodomites/

Special thank you to Steam user Sasoesegreto[ITA] for this initial find. If you have a story to submit that you either want us to cover, generally share findings or ask for support from other group members with regards to these kinds of matters, our forums are the place to go!

So a few months back, many of you may remember we talked about Obzor, a covert review manipulation website that was artificially inflating Steam games, giving positive reviews in exchange for real world money. Things have continued to trickle on in the background both in terms of Valve's investigation and some things we're carefully keeping an eye on, however, something I do want to talk about more today with regards to fake reviews is that a bot network has seemingly been uncovered by our very own Sasoesegreto on a few Steam games by, what appears to be on the surface, 4 different developers. More on that later.

Sasoesegreto did a greatly detailed and well cited write up on our forum, which I encourage you to give a read as I'll be more summarising some of the details rather than going fully in-depth as they do. They link to 80 accounts, all private, all entirely AI generated reviews, and were accounts that were exclusively writing positive and negative reviews for the exact same developers and games. I'm not going to link all of them here as it would be a super long article, but here are just the first 10 examples from the pool of 80 accounts:

• Shelton
  
• Gangster
  
• Kreker
  
• TTpocTa9I_Taka9l
  
• Владдоилжирафа
  
• ->жизньудалась
  
• >FISH<
  
• IgrokWicked
  
• CS__2017__
  
• [СаМаЯ]VREDna_Я

So, all of the accounts in question review the same games, in the same order, have roughly the same play time as each other, all have private profiles, and whose entire existence seems to be dedicated to reviewing games exclusively from these 4 developers:

• DarkEnergyStudio
  
• DeepRootsDevelop
  
• NAD Games
  
• ZaratustraGameDev

What was funny is that when Sasoesegreto made their post here initially, most if not all of the games from these developers went on to have a 100% positive rating, however, just in the last couple of days, there's been some negative reviews cropped up shown in some of the examples here (1) (2) (3), but these also appear to be bot generated and intentional. My theory is because if a game is just shy from perfect, they believe its less blatant and a further attempt to obfuscate some of the obvious manipulation going on with these games. Like we discussed in the Obzor article, some of the people doing these acts do like to throw in some red herrings whether that be throwing in 1 negative for every 10 positives or doing non-paid reviews in between the paid ones.

So, I'm looking at these 4 developers, and I'm thinking "there's too many commonalities here for these guys to be different people." You had similar header images, similar formatted descriptions, they all ran off gmail domains for their support contact page, all were Unity asset flips and all had the same people reviewing their games. However, you guys know me, I don't like to go off of circumstantial evidence and present it as the end all be all, so I decided to take a closer look at these games.

I went ahead and bought most of the games from these developers and had a dig around in the game files, and while for the most part there wasn't anything too noteworthy, I did stumble across something when looking specifically at Taxi Goldmania by ZaratustraGameDev and Beachgirl Dreams by NAD Games.

So in the game folders, there's this file called App.info. I touched upon this file in particular a couple of articles ago when discussing about Atomic Fabrik's return to Steam but for those that missed that, this file in particular has proven to be quite useful, as usually what this file houses is the "project name" for the game that it had in the Unity engine and also the Unity account that made the game. This was ultimately what cemented the connection that Atomic Fabrik had to those games we discussed a couple of weeks ago.

Now, interestingly, in the rest of the games, the account name was redacted, just being called "DefaultCompany" as exemplified here in Alcoholic Daddy's App Info file[imgur.com]. This was consistent across all the games...except for Taxi Goldmania and Beachgirl Dreams. This is where the rabbit hole begins!

When I went ahead and checked the App Info folders for Taxi Goldmania and Beachgirl Dreams[imgur.com], there were two very similar, but slightly different names listed:

• ImperiumGameCompany was listed in the App Info folder for Taxi Goldmania (which, side note, seemingly had the project working title of "Ticketless racer")
  
• ImperiumCompany was listed in the App Info folder for Beachgirl Dreams

Now, to many of you, you may not know who ImperiumCompany are, and even when me and SirViolentDeath[x.com] were giving these a look over, we couldn't quite put our finger on it, but the Imperium name did ring a bell for us. And I don't mean in the context of the Star Citizen developers, I mean more in terms of the independent realm of Steam.

After a hunt around the internet, and thanks to a post made by the Sturgeon's Law Steam group back in March of this year, it confirmed what we had suspected: ImperiumGame were among a list of shady developers that were banned from Steam back in March of this year.

But even with that, I'm thinking "Could this be just a coincidence?" "There's already the Star Citizen team using the same name, what if this might be the same thing where it's somebody different using the same name?" So I decided to go a step further.

I went to SteamDB[steamdb.info] to have a look at Imperium's old catalgoue, and already, I was seeing some commonalities between their games and the games that were up under those 4 different developer names, mainly the font and header images, but again, that's a minor piece of circumstantial evidence, I'm looking for the hook, line and sinker scoop. The main obstacles I faced here though was:

• 1. Imperium were banned from Steam, and the only games that remained on Steam were under new ownership, leaving most of their library unaccessible to me.
  
• 2. Most of their older library was made in GameMaker, which is harder on my lower-end programming and technical knowhow as to how to grab some metadata that I was looking for.

I went ahead and did purchase the remaining games that were on Steam in an attempt to see if there was anything I could pull from it, but as I suspected, I came out with nothing.

What I then did was I isolated the games in their catalogue down to just the games that were Unity games, as I theorised if I was able to either source a copy, or find somebody that had a copy of those games, they could go into said game's app info folder and we can see if the account name in there matched with what I'd found earlier.

I only found a total of 3 definite Unity games in their old catalogue: Parking Car[steamdb.info], Lazy Postman[steamdb.info], and Mad Bus[steamdb.info].

I took to social media[x.com] and put a request out and asked for anyone that had a copy or knew how to source one to please get in touch with me while I continued my desperate attempts to see if I could access the files in any other way.

Now, while I got no one contact me saying they owned the game, I did in fact get alerted by a user that they had found that Lazy Postman still had some keys available on some...unscrupulous sites. Ultimately, I decided "f*ck it" and I bit the bullet and purchased a key for Lazy Postman, I installed it, and low and behold, it confirmed my supicions[imgur.com] and Lazy Postman had the same account name listed in the App Info folder as Taxi Goldmania and gave me the smoking gun I was looking for.

So, this shows that there is indeed a large scale review manipulation happening with the use of either some form of bot network, or very carefully and maticulously managed 80+ profiles. It also shows that Imperium have somehow circumvented their ban and are actively distributing games again, reinforcing the fact that Steam developer bans now seem to be more just a revolving door with a failure of means testing to prevent developers from coming back. And it also shows, that Imperium are the ones that are behind these bots/accounts due to the accounts exclusively targeting their games.

It'll be especially interesting to see how instances like this develop after seeing the new rules put in[abcnews.go.com] by the FTC now saying that the sale or purchase of online reviews will now result in the FTC to seek civil penalties against those who knowingly violate it. While the use of bot networks may not quite fall into this, I feel it's extra important now more than ever to keep the pressure up on review manipulation signal boosting, as things do get done about them. And you never know, if the FTC adapt these rules in a continually evolving environment where AI is getting used a lot more, AI and bot reviews could be something they look at in the future.

I would please urge you all to share this, it highlights another layer to the deception of the Steam user review system, the abuse that it can go through, and also highlights the problem, like with our Atomic Fabrik article a couple weeks back, that banned developers that have shown a contempt for their customers before can still very quickly and easily come back and pedal their same tricks again.

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