Polish Developer Kicked Off Steam for Posting Fake Reviews

Steam reviews can kind of suck, right? You can pour your heart and soul into a game and still get a bunch of poor reviews because of politics, because you decided to experiment with some exciting new kind of loot box, or because your game is just awful. A lot of things could inspire ‘unfair’ reviews, but as Polish studio Acram Digital learned earlier this month, it’s best not to try to take things into your own hands, because when they tried to even out a few bad scores with a few doctored good scores, they found themselves banned from Steam entirely.

As Valve reports:

We’ve received a number of reports for Steam review manipulation on the titles Steam: Rails to Riches and Eight-Minute Empire, from Acram Digital. After investigating these reports, we have found that the developer, Grzegorz Kubas, has been trying to inflate the user review score for his titles. This is against our policy, and something we take very seriously.

Because of Grzegorz’s actions, we have removed all games/DLC developed by Acram from our store, and will no longer be doing business with him. Existing owners will be able to keep their titles.

For a small studio, losing the ability to post games on Steam is a big deal, particularly if they managed to push past the usual slog of crappy games to get some attention. So to try to save his company, Grzegorz Kubas made a comment, admitting to blame and saying only he should get punished:

You are right. I’m guilty. It came from my frustration of few bad, unfair reviews on Valve’s Steam only. It was stupid action, not something planned. This is my individual, bad behavior, not the team, so I would like to blame me, not the devs. It’s a lesson for the rest of my life and it will not happen again, ever.

Apparently, the whole reason people were even paying attention to reviews was that the studio had been very hostile to everyone posting bad reviews, so I have a feeling this plea will fall on deaf ears. But hey, at least the dude tried.