Context (2/11)
Earlier in May, we came across this reddit post, in which the author highlights a problem with Steam ToS violations in Far Far West, specifically: Don’t ask customers to review your product from within your application. In the first days after release, the game had an NPC in the main hub named "Steamy", with a Steam-logo head, saying: By decree of Gabe Newbot, I rid town to town with one Request: leave the game a review on Steam! And it opened the game's page in the Steam web browser inside the game, once you continued by pressing the F button. One day after this post, and roughly 2-3 days after release, the developer patched the problem and changed the text to: By decree of Gabe Newbot, all cowboys are offered a free ride to the general store! Whatever you do once you get there ain't my jurisdiction. This happened in r/Steam, and the audience split into two groups: One, the larger, arguing roughly: The game is good, it doesn't matter Other games do it too. The second, much smaller, arguing roughly: ToS violations of this kind give an unfair advantage, rules are for everyone. Other small violations might get your game "declined" during the initial review, so enforcement is rather inconsistent. And, regardless of our perspective on this debate, we thought it was important to dig deeper into the problem and analyze this specific case, because we have already worked on various detection mechanisms to improve the accuracy of our proprietary prediction models, and we believe we have some interesting insights to share. Also, we are releasing this material after all the potential dust has settled, because we don't want to take sides in the "moral" questions - we are a research team, after all. So, let's research then!
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