Steam's "Popular Upcoming" List Can Be Easily Manipulated

Steam may be one of the biggest PC game digital retailers, but it remains rife with technical issues. This time, these issues are potentially being manipulated to steal publicity from other games.

No More Robots founder Mike Rose took to Twitter recently to express frustration at the way Steam handles their "Popular Upcoming" list on the front page.

Rose explains it as so: The popular Upcoming list appears on the front page of Steam. It decided what games appear on the list by its release date and the number of people with the game on their watchlist. Rose explains that a developer can input any release date on Steam's backend log, changing it as they see fit. In theory, a developer could intentionally change their release date to retain ideal placement on the Popular Upcoming list.

One example Rose gives is with Eugen System's Steel Division 2. On the backend page for the game, it has a release date of March 5. The actual store page, however, has a release date of April 4, instead. Eugen System has since replied to the claim, stating that they've had April 4 as the registered date over a month ago, and their previous March 5 date was in no way done with the intention of manipulating release date info on Steam.

A member of Steam's staff also replied to Rose's tweets, stating that the company was talking about this issue the day before. He explained that the company is equally unhappy with the potential for manipulation but is struggling to find a balance between fixing the automated curator and allowing developers the freedom to communicate as they need to.

Moral of the story: don't trust Steam's Popular Upcoming Games list right now.