Valve Employee Claims They Catch Fake User Reviews "All the Time"

I don’t think it’ll come as any great shock to you that Steam is broken in some fundamentally terrible ways. From the way they do QA (which is to say, they don’t) to the way they deal with trolls and jerks, Valve's hands-off method of managing Steam has proven to both be ineffective and downright depressing at times. Still, if there’s one area they’re apparently proud of, it’s how they deal with fake developer reviews, because according to a Twitter exchange between Cliff Harris, the founder of Positech Games (who make Gratuitous Space Battles) and Tom Giardino, who works on the Steam Business team, they’re really good at catching that and do it all the time.

So basically, Cliff Harris was on Twitter complaining that Steam was really easy to manipulate talking about how any developer could get keys for their own game and falsify as many positive reviews as they want in order to make it look better. Mr. Giardino stepped in not soon afterwards, and said the following:
 

>We ban games and partners all the time for this. >It's really easy for us to see it when you do, even if you do it slowly >User reviews don't broadly correlate to sales or visibility the way developers assume they do

Yeah, he added the little arrow things himself.

Anyway, I’m not sure I believe that they do it “all the time,” because it tends to make the headlines when a developer is caught doing it, but I do believe it’s easy to catch. I also believe the bit about it not affecting sales, because typically when you’re that kind of small-time developer your pitch is going to matter than a few thumbs up from strangers.

Still, good to see that out of everything desperately needing a human’s touch in the Steam monolith, it’s the user reviews that gets the most attention.

That was sarcasm by the way.