Developer pulls a clever stunt to reveal curator scams on Steam

The owner of Cowcat Games gives scammers a taste of their own medicine.
Brok the InvestiGator game poster

Fabrice Breton, the solo creator behind the game Demetrios and owner of Cowcat Games, has recently launched another game named Brok The InvestiGator. It didn’t take him long, though, to find out that some curators were giving the game a bad review without even playing it.

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The game was released on 26 August on Steam and has received positive feedback from the community until now. The only negative reviews for the game comes from Steam curators, who are supposed to be community leaders that make accurate recommendations to help others discover intriguing games within Steam’s massive library.

Seeing that the game review sites also gave the game a thumbs up, Breton started to suspect foul play. The curators who eventually gave the game a negative review had previously given a positive one as well.

The clever developer decided to give the scammers a taste of their own medicine. He sent them prologue keys that let you play only a part of the game and pretended to send them a full key. If the curators were legit, they would return and ask why these keys were only for the demo.

Only a few curators returned to inquire about the situation, and this move ousted many fake curators out in the open. Breton believes that the scammers are pretending to be curators to steal keys from indie developers and sell them on grey sites like Kinguin, Gamivo, and G2A. Since the keys were only for the prologue, angry clients would come back at the scammers, costing them a lot of business.

He then proceeded to report the curators on Steam, and the platform admins took action. Most of the reported curators were banned. Steam should now be more careful about how the curators could use their position for scamming.

NExt: Valve releases the beta version of the new Steam Mobile App

Steam's library of games with a little mobile phone at the bottom of the image

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