Indie Developers Targetted by Mysterious Advertisement Ring

So I've been on the Steam platform for almost 15 years now and I've been absorbed in the behind the scenes workings of Steam and its shady little corners. I've seen the grey market key sites, I've seen the likes of the website Miped[techraptor.net] being used as a forum board to bribe people for votes on Steam Greenlight, and I've even seen the mafia esque circles and communities that fester in Steam to intimidate developers to get money out of them. But out of them all, this is definitely up there with the weirdest things I've seen, mostly because even as I write this I don't fully understand quite what is going on here, but I'm going to present what we know as is and to keep an open eye on this happening going forward.

I was shown by our loyal researcher Sir Violent Death an article on The Indie Informer talking about an interesting case[the-indie-in-former.com] of some Steam users going out and promoting a developer's game on other game developer's Steam pages, without permission, without either party fully understanding why. And when I say the users are going out and promoting the game, I don't mean the word of mouth spread where someone recommends a game that's a bit similar or a casual recommendation between friends, the posts that have appeared very much are dressed up like advertising material for the game. The users in question even seemingly pass themselves off as the developer/publisher(s) of these games. It seems really that even though these users pass themselves off to be representatives of the product, they in fact have no affiliation to them. Here's an example[i0.wp.com] highlighted by The Indie Informer by a user called Cutie who surfaced in a review for Dave the Diver to promote Königsborgs' upcoming game Don Duality set to release tomorrow, August 25th.

Originally posted by Cutie:
Hello! You might be interested. We are making a similar game! We plan to finish it by the end of summer! Check out the page of our game. If you like it, add the game to your wishlist, it will help with promotion! Thank you and sorry for the inconvenience!

As highlighted by The Indie Informer, the posts aren't malicious at all, they are very politely worded and almost like your more innocent spam until you delve into the deeper fact that these people don't actually have anything to do with the games that they promote.

The Indie Informer highlights in particular reviews on Dave the Diver to be a target, however, our very own SVD has in fact found these comments on other game pages too, including a City Builder game called Kingdoms and Castles. The comments as of my writing seem to have disappeared since SVD initially found them, however SVD took a capture from when he was doing his initial looking, this time from a user called Anna[cdn.discordapp.com]. Anna in this post does a similar form of promotion, almost a direct copy and paste with a few extra exclamation marks added in, but for a game called Bee Island developed and published by Lemma Arts.

So naturally, since the spamming was getting particularly bad mainly on Dave The Diver and Kingdoms and Castles pages, a lot of users, naturally assuming that these people posting these comments were part of the dev team, went to Don Duality and Bee Island's forums to criticise the action, saying its spamming and that its a bad promotion tactic killing positive thoughts people had of the game. On the Bee Island thread however, Lemma Arts, Bee Island's developer and publisher responded to this saying the following:

Originally posted by Lemma Arts:
Hello everyone! Our team is just as surprised as you are. We don't spam and we really don't like that our game was the victim of such an attack. We're trying to figure out what's going on.
I also remind you that you should not click on links sent to you by strangers!
We don't have a website. Bee Island does not have a website.
The game is sold only on Steam and VK Play.
We do not sell keys. Please do not try to purchase it from third parties or other sites!

And not just there but Don Duality's team made a post on their forums denying any involvement with the spam comments. Mike, the community director said that the team had conducted their own investigation and even found that the posts were getting written up in other languages such as in Polish[cdn.discordapp.com] and in German[cdn.discordapp.com].

Mike ended the post by stating:

Originally posted by Mike:
We have already contacted Steam to resolve this issue. Actions of those who post these spam comments not only sabotage our efforts to create a healthy community around our game but also ruin experience for players all over the platform. We encourage Steam users to report those messages.
We will ensure to provide you with updates regarding the resolution of this issue. We appreciate your understanding and support!

As of the time of writing all of the spam comments seem to have disappeared, including some that appeared for a game called Sunkenland on some Subnautica reviews[imgur.com]. Unlike the previous two developers however, Vector3 Studio, developers and publishers of Sunkenland have not commented on the matter.

And unfortunately, that's where the trail ends for now. Now, I don't buy into the story that some users have floated about that these developers are lying. It would be such a huge cover up to pull off and the fact that the messages are the exact same and how both the stories match up, I feel the developers and publishers at least aren't directly involved.

Another theory I've heard float about is that these accounts are in fact either bots or stolen accounts that may be getting used by some sort of marketing agency that the developers/publishers may have worked with and they were unknowing that this was the sort of advertisement that they would do. I find that a bit more believable but again, there's still uncertainty about it.

At the end of the day, this is baffling as its not like Miped where there was a clear gain to be had. On the surface level, it seems these commenters don't gain anything by doing this, and the developers clearly don't like it as they say it paints their games in a bad light because they're getting spammed about everywhere. Is it a reputational thing, are they trying to damage the game? Why would that be?

Please do let me know what you think in the comments below. Like I said, it seems the comments are all gone for now, but it is something we will be keeping an eye on.

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