Steam Users Form ‘Scam Report’ To Watch For Shady Business

Steam Users Form ‘Scam Report’ To Watch For Shady Business

Steam is kind of a minefield. Sometimes mid-development projects get abandoned. Other times, developers try to bury legitimate questions or criticism.

The majority of the time, those things do not happen. Games launch, they’re either solid or crappy, and life goes on. But there have been enough instances of sketchy games and abrasive developers on Steam to warrant the occasional widespread controversy, frequent complaint threads, and an entire subreddit, among other things. And in some cases, Valve either doesn’t react quickly or refuses to intervene at all.

That’s where Steam curator group Scam Report comes in. They attempt to use Steam’s curator system — which allows groups to post short evaluations of games that can get prime real estate on home pages and store pages — to catalogue the following:

“Abandoned Early Access titles, Early Access titles from devs with a history of abandoning unfinished games, games that don’t have the features they claim, or from devs with a history of misconduct.”

So basically, they want to be the canary in the endless labyrinth of a coal mine.

The group’s name is perhaps a bit… overzealous (not every sketchy or abandoned game is necessarily a scam), but their goal is admirable, and they have definitely slapped “PROCEED AT YOUR OWN PERIL” signs on some worthy games. For instance, their rundowns of games like Journey of the Light and Godusare succinct and useful:

The issue, however, is that it’s hard to be 100 per cent certain on a lot of this stuff. A group like this, in theory, requires tons of investigation (rather than just taking hearsay at face value — something that happens a lot when people dogpile on a game or developer they consider sketchy) and frequent updates given that some games might appear sketchy, only to resume updating or somehow prove otherwise.

There’s also room for a lot of subjectivity in running a group like this, only some of which is useful. For instance, free games set in the same universe to tide people over. Are they taking for-goddamn-ever with it? Absolutely. Is KRZ a “scam” or abandonware or whatever? Probably not.

And then, of course, there’s the thorny issue of what constitutes good discussion moderation versus “censorship,” a word that’s been diluted to the point of abject meaninglessness in this day and age. Certainly, some developers get banhammer-happy when their game’s under fire by legitimately incensed players, and that’s bad news. They absolutely should be called out for that, and it would be nice if Valve had more consistent rules against squelching legitimate critique. But there are also plenty of good reasons for developers to shut down discussions. For instance, people might be treating each other poorly, derailing discussion, or spreading previously disproven misinformation. Steam forums blur the line between public and private spaces, and — to be frank — you don’t have the right to say whatever you want in them. In some cases for better, in some cases for worse, devs make the rules there.

In all likelihood, Valve would say the emergence of a group like Scam Report is an example of Steam working as intended — or mostly as intended. They have been beating the “user-generated content” drum/melodica/hat trumpet for years now, and they claim that Steam is on its way to becoming a fully open platform. The goal of systems like Steam curator groups is for users to create and moderate their own communities, to patch up holes Valve can’t (due, perhaps, to conflicting priorities or the overwhelming volume of Stuff happening on Steam).

Problem is, users are only really accountable to themselves. In most cases they have the best of intentions — and sometimes good, well-considered methods on top of that — but this isn’t their job. They can be sloppy about it, or only update sporadically, or disappear without warning, or present a knee-jerk reaction as fact instead of doing proper research. Are big companies like Valve better at handling these kinds of things? Not necessarily. But there’s more on the line when you’re doing something for a service that foots your bills — and that you, in all likelihood, derive a lot of personal pride from (or pressure, when the community’s pissed off).

Maybe the solution is for Valve to take an active role in holding people accountable, or to create better incentives for people to keep themselves accountable. Regardless, Valve would do well to pay attention to curator groups like Scam Report (or Framerate Police or what have you) and the forum posts, news reports, and whatnot that inform them. Clearly, they represent instances where users feel like an issue isn’t being properly addressed on Steam, so they have taken matters into their own hands by using Steam groups in ways Valve didn’t expect. Now, as the proprietor of a largely open, user-driven system, the ball is in Valve’s court. It’s time for Valve to react and improve their systems so that users can do a better job of cleaning up messes GabeN and co can’t — rather than essentially saying, “Eh, good enough” and leaving these systems alone.


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