Valve announced today that the poorly-reviewed stealth game Art of Stealth was removed from Steam after it was discovered that its developer forged positive reviews.
Art of Stealth
Art of Stealth‘s developer has been lashing out against negative Steam reviews over the last few days. In fact, if you’ve heard of the game before, it could be because developer Matan Cohen picked a fight with YouTube personality Jim Sterling after he trashed the game in a video, calling it “absolutely terrible rubbish”.
Cohen’s studio fired back that Sterling has “no respect to software engineers who learned programming in university for 5 years and work hard to create a good game”. The Art of Stealth team then filed a DMCA takedown request for Sterling’s video and then, Sterling claims, sent him legal threats.
In a statement, Valve explains that Cohen “appears to have created multiple Steam accounts to post a positive review for their own game”, noting that this is a violation of Steam’s review policy. Very sad. Luckily for legit fans, the game will still be available in their Steam library.
Comments
12 responses to “Steam Removes Game After Developer Posts Fake Reviews”
Im sorry, just because you studied for 5 years doesn’t mean you can make a good game, it comes down to knowledge, skills, initiative and experience as a collective.
Funnily enough i have been told off by some work experience kids before because ‘iv been in uni for 4 years, i know how to do it’ and they always get cranky when I just giggle at them and say ‘no you dont’
Heh, I’ve met a few coders in my time who went to Uni to learn and are just rubbish.
Wow – I can’t believe they try and defend that….
It’s almost like they are trying to make it bad, also it looks horrible :\
And that intro voice-over! I seriously think they should have put this under ‘satire’ on steam…
I love it when ‘studios’ get butthurt when Jim rips on their game, they keep playing the victim, claiming he’s being mean and unfair when pretty much 100% of the time, the game is complete trash. This video was in my ‘eeeehh I’ll watch it some other time’ pile, but seeing yet another one of these happen has jumped this one to watch as soon as I get some. Not all publicity is good publicity.
These people just throw their first attempt at a game on Steam and expect to be cut slack because it’s their first game, I’m sorry but as soon as you start charging for a product there is a threshold of quality that is expected and people are going to judge and critique you. If instead of taking the criticism on board and using it to get better, you instead decide to go into damage control and start DCMAing what is literally just your game with commentary, maybe consider going back to university and trying something else.
see this is an interesting view, not that I disagree necessarily, but talking about the games as though they are a ‘product’ and have an expected level of quality is odd to me. I see games more as entertainment/art, and in that case what you pay for when you pay to experience art or entertainment is not really any expectation of a service or benefit to you – it’s more of a gesture or a compensation to the creators for dedicating their time to the creation of said art or entertainment. obviously when it comes to video games there is an expectation that the thing will actually function at all but that’s kind of the only legitimate criteria in my eyes. anything after that is opinion and subject to the players level of engagement with the art.
I’m not even gonna bother reading this back to check it makes sense :p
Pricing comes into it too. If the game is a first attempt, is rubbish but is also priced to reflect that then I see no issue. Trying to charge something like $15-$20 for a rubbish game is ludicrous though.
They posted an update yesterday claiming that the reviews belonged to friends of theirs who wanted to support the game, so people should stop saying bad things because it’s making them upset.
Friends who apparently took the time to download and install Steam, create an account, upload an avatar picture, download the game and then write a review, but couldn’t be bothered to play the game for more than a few minutes. How stupid do they think people are?
Now if Valve will just do something about the flood of obviously vote-boosted asset flipped garbage from Greenlight that’s flooding their store.
Wow! Google Jim Sterling (or look at his video library) and you get pages of news posts about crappy game developers threatening him and loosing… search those developers on Steam and you find put they dont exist.
What made this guy think for a second anything he did about dodgey reviews and fake DMCA takedowns was a good idea? Jim always seems to find the ones that bite! Thank God For Him
#WTFU
Where’s The Fair Use?
Its not a fair use issue, its the which button makes a video disappear quickly from youtube.
Also DMCA dont work on Jim Sterling videos cause he figured out that he can “seed” his videos so it bottlenecks the DMCA.
True. It got me thinking of Walker’s movement as it was one of the sub-issues covered.
The DMCA is meant to combat copyright infringement but some have sough to abuse it as a means to censer comments they don’t like.
A missed opportunity..
Cecilia (I mean her friends) should be writing a comment here about how good the article is.