by Psychbomb / April 7, 2026
DISCLAIMER: All information contained hereforth has been verified to be true to the best of the writer's knowledge and ability. Care has been taken to archive public-facing posts through (what are at the time of publication considered to be) trusted website archival services such as Internet Archive and GhostArchive, and readers are strongly encouraged to review these copies of said posts for themselves; should both the original posts be deleted and the archived copies lost such that they cannot be independently verified by readers, they are to be considered invalid in the context of this article. Due to the nature of astroturfing relying on obfuscation, the information presented within this article should not be considered exhaustive. All arguments, conclusions, and discussions pertaining to the information within this article are the sole opinion of the writer and should not be taken as fact.
Marketers ruined the Internet, as they have ruined everything else good in this world.
The modern web is absolutely fucking infested with ads. It's been this way since the old web, too, but what's gotten way worse in the decades that I've been online are the ways in which people pretend that they aren't trying to sell you something. At some point way, way, way back in ancient history (the 1990s), marketers figured out how to be really annoying about ads on the computer. Banner ads would flash rapidly, play loud noises or music, and pop up in their own windows to cover the entire screen. Sometimes they would enter these horrific loops where the bit of code that made them open in a new window never terminated, so they would open fresh browser processes as fast as they could until your system ran out of memory and the processor shot itself in the head.
Adblockers came along soon after as a response to these shit ads, and their presence has never not been needed. They've been a real bugbear for the marketers coming on four decades, now; it's an arms race that continues to this day, with websites and advertisers figuring out new ways to break the adblockers, and the adblockers busting through whatever new restrictions have been put in place. It's gotten pretty baroque. The amount of shit I need to install at this point to download YouTube videos through my terminal is bordering on gratuitous, but I'll be damned if I'm paying a cent for Premium.
Anyway, adblockers only work if you know about them and and are capable of deploying them. Marketers can push TikTok and Instagram ads for beauty products to teenagers on their walled garden cell phones and expect to get a lot of reach, and the same is true if they're putting life insurance testimonials on cable TV for the sixty year-olds watching Judge Judy reruns. These are demographics that tend to be pretty receptive to ads (we went from calling artists with record deals sellouts to "get your bag, queen!"), and those that aren't usually don't have the means or knowledge to build a Pi-hole. The big problem for advertisers comes when they're marketing a niche tech product to a bunch of fucking nerds who know how adblockers work, such as those on Reddit.
Reddit has a problem with self promo, in that doing self promotion is one of the quickest ways to get your posts removed and your account banned. One particularly infamous example of this happened late in 2025, when an artist by the name of Hayden Clay Williams was banned from r/art and had his entire post history purged after posting a comment directing people to his website, where they could purchase prints of his work. The people revolted, and all of the r/art moderators stepped down, but this is an exceptional case. It's far more likely that if you were to do the same thing, you'd be banned without ceremony or recourse. This makes sense as a measure intended to stop Reddit from becoming so infested with ads that they drown out any existing user content. What it accomplishes in practice is that it creates a perverse incentive to lie, and to pretend that you're not a marketer even when you are.
I've seen the term try to be twisted into softer, nicer phrases like "stealth marketing", but this is good old-fashioned shilling. Accounts pretending to be unaffiliated customers will post their sponsored opinions while secretly working alongside (or being run exclusively by) a marketing agency who are pushing a product. This used to be called out more frequently in the earlier years of the site, because Reddit was once dominated entirely by hypercritical geeks who were eager to call fake and gay on just about every post ever made; they got a thrill out of being right when others were wrong, and being the one to point out that everyone else was being lied to by an astroturfer hit them like ketamine. Reddit today is in the top ten sites visited globally, and caters to all sorts of marginally less-critical nerds. This is a great market to try and draw in, and it's easier than ever to get them on the hook.
What people try and catch the shills by today is an overuse of overenthusiastic stock phrases, often being trotted out for video games that absolutely nobody on the planet would have such strong devotion to. They "don't get the hate", they "don't care what people are saying", and they're "having a blast". Having a blast is the big one. Everyone is always having a blast for the biggest pieces of shit you've ever seen. People were having a blast with the new Saint's Row reboot, they were having a blast with Concord, they were having a blast with Highguard. MindsEye was the most poorly-reviewed game of 2025 by a significant margin, and you had better believe people were having a blast with that one, too.
It's gotten to the point where people on Reddit have developed a pejorative for what they perceive as the uncritical, shilling masses: "blast-havers". Blast-haver occupies a similar sort of area as "consoomer", one degree removed from the wojaks and filtered through the language of Redditors rather than Channers. For blast-havers, they reject all forms of critique or reflection, preferring instead to try and shut down all dissent by whining that nobody is allowed to just enjoy things anymore. More insidiously, a blast-haver may well be one of the stealth marketing secret agents mentioned above; they pretend as though they're naive mental toddlers who buy whatever's flashy and new in an attempt to trick people into doing the same.
While it may feel good to call someone a blast-haver and believe that you've done your part in exposing the filth-encrusted underbelly of the astroturfers, I think this is something that soothes rather than cures. In the vast majority of cases, it manifests only as venting your anger over the existence of a middling video game at a stranger who likes it. Think about it for a moment: if the marketers all used the same phrases, then it would make them easy to identify. What's the point, then? The goal is obfuscation, and making it obvious that you're being paid to shill a product defeats the entire purpose.
Much to the delight of the advertising companies, Reddit made a change not too long ago that allows users to hide their post history. This way, if you suspect someone of advertising and click on their account to check if they've been posting the same ads all across the site, you won't see anything at all. There's no way to collect proof through the website. Search engines, however, love indexing Reddit. It's trivial to circumvent all of this obfuscation by punching their username into Google with site:reddit.com at the end to see all of their posts. This introduces an extra step when it comes to checking someone's account, which is certainly a headache for the moderators, but makes it easy for those of us with more free time to dive deep into specific accounts.
EDITOR'S NOTE: At a point in writing this where I thought I was done with the research, I came across this tool. If I had found it before I started digging through these accounts manually, I would have called it invaluable; having discovered it so late into writing, I can only say now that it helped. I would still recommend manually searching any suspicious accounts in order to double-check your work, but this should be helpful in the event you wind up attempting the same thing as me.
Anyway, I think I found some astroturfers.
DIVING DEEP, or: GREEN PLASTIC GRASS
I didn’t go looking for any of these, because they came to me.
r/truegaming is one of the few subreddits I like. I'd cite two core reasons for this: posts tend to be pretty high effort, and it's one of the only communities I've seen where the "true" modifier at the start doesn’t indicate that you're about to enter a Stormfront offshoot. I was browsing through some of the new threads a few months back, and spotted one really bad write-up on the 2025 reboot of Painkiller. It was a breathless recounting of a bunch of marketing copy elements, all of which had clearly been pushed through ChatGPT before being published. My first instinct was that this was just some schmuck trying to feel like they were a real writer by passing off AI garbage as their own work, and clicked on their profile to see what else they had posted. Nothing. Their post history was hidden. I got the gut feeling that we were dealing with a marketer, and so decided to write the name down and monitor their posts.
I want to make this a little bit tricky for any marketing agencies namesearching to make sure their accounts haven't been exposed, so I'll refer to this individual only as "Crispy". You'll be able to see their full username when you click through the examples below.
Before we get straight into what I suspect to be the marketing posts in question, we first need to reckon with the means by which all astroturfing accounts must all begin. "Karma" is the Reddit way of tracking the total number of upvotes you've gotten in your time using the website; if you get a net three upvotes on one post, three upvotes on another, and then you make a really good post that gets a hundred upvotes, your account's karma rating is set to +106. In order to curb spammers, trolls, and other undesirables, most subreddits will set a minimum karma threshold before a user is allowed to make threads or comments. These minimum values tend to be pretty low, often no more than ten or fifty karma. Getting this amount is trivial.
Karmafarming, then, is a method by which users will trawl through high-activity, low-requirement subreddits, posting a deluge of comments designed to draw in at least one or two upvotes from passing posters. I recall the easiest method from back in the day was to go on r/AskReddit and reply to every single post with something low-effort and "funny", and then wind up with enough karma to post pretty much wherever you'd like. You can get a hundred karma from one really good post, or you can get one karma each from a hundred shitty posts, and the system doesn't really care one way or the other. As long as you've got the karma, you're good.
The meta has shifted a bit since then, and it's become even easier to karmafarm on subreddits focusing on interpersonal relationship drama. r/AITA (Am I The Asshole?) and r/AIO (Am I Overreacting?) are particularly good at this, because they encourage binary responses: either you are the asshole or you aren't, and you are overreacting or you aren't. Regardless of if you sympathize with the original poster or dumpster the shit out of them and call them names, you'll be backed up by the one half of posters who align with the side of the binary that you've planted your banner in. There can be some complicated moral quandaries that get brought up, but you don't have to engage with those. Stick to the simple stuff about how cheaters are bad.
That's the method that Crispy seems to prefer, karmafarming on subreddits like r/AITAH (Am I The Asshole Here?), r/Advice, and r/TrueOffMyChest with ChatGPT pablum; simple, flattering, self-help language about respect and boundaries, filtered through platitudes like "this doesn't define you", and "you've got this". You should also take note of the dates that all of these were posted, with each comment falling in the span of a single week in early August 2025. This is before the marketing posts start, and so it's safe to assume that these were serving as the karmafarm springboard to launch into other subreddits with higher minimum karma requirements.
Most stomach-turning of all, though, is that these posts aren't limited to simple, minor dilemmas. Being cheated on or scammed or having an inattentive boyfriend are all shitty, yes, but they pale in comparison to one post made on r/offmychest where Crispy attempts to console a woman who was raped by her boyfriend. (This is the spot to watch for any coming comment deletions, by the way.) In a vacuum, Crispy is handling it well enough; they're making it clear that the boyfriend is in the wrong, and that she needs to tell the people she trusts in her life about it. Set aside that I believe this is copied verbatim from an LLM for a moment, and I find the sentiment to be good. What really bothers me is the fact that Crispy is using this post about a woman discussing her rape so that they can get easy upvotes to go and advertise some fucking video games.
WOLVES HUNT IN PACKS
With their account's karma now high enough to let them post in most places on Reddit, the astroturfer will likely not go to the biggest and most active subreddits right away. It instead makes more sense to shift gears and lurk through smaller, slower subs; this ensures that your posts won't get immediately buried by everyone else, and the less-frequented ones tend to have mods who are a bit more forgiving of shitty posts. Even if you're trying to sell something, a lot of them are just happy to see anyone posting anything there at all.
One look at Crispy's posts for Painkiller (2025) is all it takes to see this process in action. There was the one on r/truegaming that I mentioned earlier, but there are plenty of other examples: we've got one in r/boomershooters, one written entirely by ChatGPT in r/TheGamerLounge, and another in r/videogames. While r/videogames certainly isn't a tiny subreddit, it still pales in size and popularity when compared to its more successful siblings r/gaming and r/Games. Feel free to take note of the subreddits that these ads are being posted in as we go, and marvel at how many of them there are that no human being alive has ever heard of.
There are a ton of different posts for a variety of games, with some posted as recently as February of this year. We've got a few for a game called Tabletop Game Shop Simulator (not to be confused with the more successful TCG Card Shop Simulator, though both games pull from the same design template). Here are a couple for the cheating service Plitch. Here's one for a game called Fata Deum. I've got more for Active Matter, Docked, Bus Bound (since removed), and Lessaria. These are names that are going to come up again later, so try to keep them in mind. There's also a game in here called Isekai: Waifu Overlord that's a total AI slopfest, and it's being posted in such illustrious subreddits as r/HentaicumslutsAI, r/HentaiAiParadise, and r/Hentai_AnimeNSFW.
Enter account number two.
Though they come bearing a different name, the posts are broadly the same. "Yawa" (a shortening of their username for reasons discussed above) seems to have started life as an organic account; there are a good amount of posts dating to over a year back where they're just chatting about popular video games in a manner that doesn't make me think they're trying to sell anything to anyone. Crispy, by comparison, doesn't make a post unless they've got an advertisement ready to go along with it. If I had to guess, I would say that Yawa is someone's personal account that they also use for astroturfing. It certainly makes them look more legitimate, but not enough that it isn't still obvious what they're doing.
When Crispy is posting about Lessaria on October 20, 2025, Yawa is posting about Lessaria five days earlier. When Crispy is posting about Tabletop Game Shop Simulator on October 28, 2025, Yawa is posting about Tabletop Game Shop Simulator six days earlier. When Crispy is posting about Active Matter on October 11, 2025, Yawa is posting about Active Matter four days earlier. When Crispy is posting about Plitch on December 2, 2025, Yawa is posting about Plitch nine days later. When Crispy is posting about Fata Deum on October 13, 2025, Yawa is posting about Fata Deum three days later. When Crispy is posting about Bus Bound on February 19, 2026, Yawa is posting about Bus Bound one day before. When Crispy is posting a trailer for Docked on February 19, 2026, Yawa is posting the same trailer just one minute prior.
Maybe that's not enough for you. That's fine, and I don't judge you. How strange is it, really, for people to post about the same games around the same times? They could just have the same interests, and everyone on Earth exists within the same general window of a game's relevance. Surely if these accounts were run by the same people, there would be some harder evidence than a handful of posts that happen to line up with one another. Maybe it wouldn't be anything as obvious as, say, both accounts sharing the same YouTube link with the same tracking details appended to the end of the URL, but it would be something. Right?
Can you tell what I'm setting you up for?
On January 6, 2026, Crispy posted a trailer for a Painkiller (2025) update, titled "Metal As Hell". About two and a half hours later, Yawa posted the same trailer to a different subreddit. There are a few things about this that struck me as odd: for one, the trailer was about three weeks old at the time both accounts posted it, meaning that this was already a little stale. For another, the video has only managed to get about five thousand views in the nearly four months that it's been live, so it wasn't a particularly popular upload. To round out the rule of threes, Crispy and Yawa were the only two people on Reddit posting about it.
Oh, and the YouTube tracking details are identical between both posts, because they forgot to purge them from the end of the URL.
Feel free to go ahead and open up YouTube right now. Go on any video you'd like. Click the share button, and note the "si=[CODE]" part at the end of the shortened URL. Now, open up an incognito window, load up the same video, and repeat the process. Do you see how the tracking information in that "si=" section is different? Open another incognito window and do all of this again as many times as it takes to sate your curiosity. Even though your browser is the same, and your IP address is the same, and all of your hardware is the same, and your operating system is the same, and you're not logged in on an account, you will get different tracking URLs with every single attempt. There are only two possibilities for why these two different Reddit posters would both have videos with identical tracking information:
1. They're the same person.
2. They both got the URL from a single source. Either Yawa took it from Crispy, or a third party gave both accounts the same link.
This alone isn't enough for me to believe that the accounts are in collusion with one another. Taken with everything else, though, the alternative seems vanishingly unlikely.
WHERE ALL ROADS LEAD
What was frustrating was how difficult it was to connect all of this to a single entity.
I had Romulus and Remus both in my grasp, as it were, but neither of them were keen on giving up where Rome was. They'd provided me with a ton of different leads to follow, and it was now my job to figure out where they all pointed to. Fine. Not like I hadn't committed too much time to this already. What were a few more hours of my miserable fucking life?
It took longer than I'd hoped to find any satisfying connections. There were a few things that looked like leads, but they fizzled out quickly; the names of a few titles published by Saber Interactive and Aerosoft GmbH popped up during my searching, yet different marketing teams were credited to each one. I dug through their staff records to see if any of them had been branching out to some of the other games I'd seen. They hadn't, unsurprisingly. The advertisers credited for Painkiller (2025) were different from the advertisers credited for Lessaria who were different from the advertisers credited for Fata Deum.
One day, out of nowhere, the faintest of miracles landed in my lap. Perhaps it was divine providence. Yawa got sloppy. It was nothing new for them to post an ad for a game, but the ad copy this time around read like it was for was for their own services. Rather than the standard faux-organic engagement bait like "here's a cool thing I found in a game" or "does anyone know how to beat this part of the game?", this was targeted at indie developers looking to market their games through influencer sponsorships. The service was called "Trapster", and Yawa was making a lot of different posts trying to sell people on it. This marked a hell of a turn from everything else they'd been posting up to that point.
Sure enough, there are only two other accounts across the entire website posting about Trapster. One of them, "Monk", exists largely for the purpose of advertising Trapster, spamming the comments of any indie dev asking on Reddit about ways to market their work. (As well as posting about Bus Bound, natch.) It's phenomenally lazy, and a wonder how the account hasn't already been banned at time of publication.
The other account bears the name of one Pavel Beresnev.
THE USUAL SUSPECTS
Pavel Beresnev is a public figure. He is the COO of his company, has nearly 5,000 followers on LinkedIn, pays for LinkedIn Premium, and has verified his identity to LinkedIn by submitting to them copies of his government ID. If the Reddit account with his name on it is run by him, he has been inserting himself into recent controversy regarding Edmund McMillen's anti-publisher comments. He has also given statements to the press in regards to a previous controversy that his company has been embroiled in. I give you all of this preamble because I am going to be directly citing posts that he has made on his LinkedIn to draw some conclusions about where these astroturfing posts are coming from, and I don't want it said that he isn't a public figure. It is unquestionable that he is.
He's also part of the team that's launching Trapster. There's not enough public information for me to say that Trapster is his creation (Pavel is much more open about his founding role with another company, which we'll get to), but he is the only name that I could find attached to the project. With Yawa and the account with Pavel's name on it being two of the only three accounts on Reddit that were talking about Trapster, I figured that this might have been the central point where everything connected. There's one LinkedIn post from Pavel where he mentions that he has "some acquaintances" working on Lessaria, and complains that people accused their trailer of using AI; as mentioned earlier, Yawa and Crispy have also both posted about Lessaria. It seemed as though I was on the right track.
Of course, there are far more obvious factors to consider than just that. Pavel is also the founder and acting chief operations officer of Trap Plan, which is a video game marketing agency specializing in astroturfing on Reddit. That may sound like an accusation, but it isn't; Trap Plan proudly advertises what they call a "Stealth Reddit Package", where they claim they will "[position] the post like a real developer story", and "craft posts that feel native and invite discussion, not suspicion" in exchange for 2,500 Euro. I don't think that they're particularly good at doing this.
In fact, you might already be familiar with these names, because Pavel and Trap Plan were the ones at the center of the last big controversy about Reddit astroturfing. One heroic gumshoe on r/Games by the name of Forestl went digging through the same channels back in November 2025, and managed to find some posts from Pavel's LinkedIn where he showed off the stooge accounts that Trap Plan used to shill games. Sure enough, Yawa's name is in there.
Fuck.
They already admitted to doing this, and they provided their own screenshots, no less. It was a little disheartening to find out that I was breaking a story that had broken nearly half a year ago.
The post on r/Games ended up making some big waves. If you google "Trap Plan" or "Pavel Beresnev" today, you'll get results on the very first page talking about their astroturfing endeavors. This isn't a great reputation to have, especially when selling discretion. This article by PC Gamer and this article by Kotaku both discuss Pavel's deleted admissions of astroturfing on Reddit in the wake of Forestl's exposé, though both websites point to the same now-dead links on the Internet Archive. Kotaku additionally claims that they received an email from Pavel where he went on the record stating that Trap Plan went rogue, shilling across Reddit without the knowledge or consent of their client MY.GAMES.
With all of this laid out, it's easy for us to confirm the rest of the studios they've worked with. Trap Plan's "TikTok Package" page contains a smattering of screenshots for ads they've made to be published on TikTok. The images are tiny, but it's not hard to identify what the games are at time of publication if you look closely: on their live website, they've got screenshots of the work they did for Painkiller (2025), World of Tanks: Heat, and The Eternal Life of Goldman. It shouldn't surprise you at this point to learn that Crispy and Yawa have both posted about Painkiller (2025) and World of Tanks: Heat, with Monk and Yawa posting for the past month or so about The Eternal Life of Goldman. Another Trap Plan page has Fata Deum screenshots all over it, and you already know how Crispy and Yawa have posted about that one.
And I just have to wonder what the point of all this astroturfing is, when Trap Plan offers more honest services that appear to be more successful. Most of the posts I found on Reddit were largely either being ignored or getting clowned on. r/lifesimulators hates Tabletop Game Shop Simulator. r/incremental_games downvoted the shit out of Yawa's Fata Deum post, and the only comments they got told them that they were in the wrong place and accused them of being a bot. Crispy posted about Tabletop Game Shop Simulator on r/tycoon but forgot to include the name of the game anywhere in the post, and because it's so fucking generic, the comments identified it as one of the competition's games. Ouch! If I paid four figures for the Stealth Reddit Package and this was the kind of copy that was getting sent out, I'd be pissed.
But that was it. The same people who did it last time are the same ones who did it this time. It was unexciting. Obvious. Yet even with the mystery uncovered (or perhaps re-uncovered), I felt unsatisfied. There was still one critical issue that nobody had addressed.
THE ONE CRITICAL ISSUE THAT NOBODY HAS ADDRESSED
Why aren't Trap Plan or any of their employees credited on these games?
Seriously, nobody seems to have asked this. Why was it so hard for me to find this central point where all of these threads connected? Why was it not as simple as looking through the credits of the video games themselves? So many advertising firms and individual marketers are credited all over these games, but the people at Trap Plan never seem to show up anywhere. Even after I got a list of names for the people who work there to cross-reference their staff, they're not in the credits for Painkiller, they're not in the credits for Fata Deum, and they're not in the credits for Global Rescue (which I haven't talked about because they don't appear to have gone for the astroturfing package, but both Trap Plan and Trapster currently have it in their marquee of games they've worked on). Why aren't they credited anywhere?
Here are a few possibilities that I've considered, but discounted:
"They're credited under aliases."
Possible, but irrelevant. The question would then become "why are they under aliases?", which has the same core issue of the people involved not being credited.
"It's all post-launch support, so it's normal for them not to be credited."
It's not all post-launch support. The Eternal Life of Goldman isn't out yet, and neither are Active Matter or World of Tanks: Heat or Isekai: Waifu Overlord. Yawa was posting about Painkiller (2025) on September 23, 2025, about a month before the game released. Was twenty-eight days not enough time to slot Trap Plan into the credits?
"It's a bad actor trying to make Trap Plan and the associated games look bad by doing obvious astroturfing and then blaming them for it."
This doesn't really make sense, considering how Trap Plan were found to be doing this once before, still advertise that they're doing it to this day, and proudly provide examples on their website of the games they claim to have worked on.
"All of these studios are maliciously hiding Trap Plan's involvement. / Trap Plan is requesting that they be left off of any credits to cover their tracks and the studios are complying."
This is quite unlikely, requiring a whole lot of malice across a whole lot of different studios. It would be a huge amount of effort to establish and maintain this as some massive international conspiracy, all to then have Trap Plan openly brag about what they're doing on their website. I can't imagine there being that much effort put into that much collusion across this many studios while such little effort goes into actually obscuring the astroturfing.
"Trap Plan isn't affiliated with these games at all, but is providing free marketing in order to appear as though they serve big clients."
Doubtful to the point of being nonsense, but so funny that I don’t have the heart to not consider it a little bit. Almost zero chance this is real.
That leaves me with a grand total of two possibilities that I think are the most likely explanations:
Possibility #1: Studios are outsourcing to marketing firms, and these marketing firms are themselves outsourcing to companies like Trap Plan.
This has been a "problem" in animation for ages now: American animation houses outsource work to countries like South Korea or China, and those animation houses outsource that same work to North Korea. It's illegal for Americans to commission work from North Korean enterprises, but it isn't illegal for them to work with studios elsewhere in Asia who then work with North Korean studios. Everyone wins, in a way. Americans get to exploit cheap labor stimulate the global economy, the unsanctioned Asian studios get to keep a chunk of the original outsourcing payment without having to do much work themselves, and the North Koreans get payment for work that American laws normally prevent them from doing. Best of all, the Americans get to have total deniability of it all. They didn't work directly with the North Koreans, their outsourced teams did. Odds are decent enough that the Americans didn't even know what was going on.
And so everyone gets afforded the benefit of the doubt. Even though you did your dealings in a way that probably would have landed you a fine or some other form of legal trouble had you done them directly, the fact that you tumbled it through one or two additional channels first makes it a-okay in the eyes of the law.
Possibility #2: Video games suck ass when it comes to crediting people anyway, so Trap Plan not getting credited isn't surprising.
It would be bad luck to do work for so many games and never receive a single credit for any of them, but not that bad luck. According to the 2023 Developer Satisfaction Survey conducted by the International Game Developers Association, 7% of gaming industry respondents said that they had never been credited for any of the work they had done; 16% claimed to "sometimes" be credited, and 10% claimed to "seldom" be credited. For freelance and contract positions, the percentage of people who say they've never been credited nearly doubles, jumping from 7% up to 13%.
Sure enough, a lot of the games listed above have credits that are utterly barren. The Eternal Life of Goldman's demo kept pestering me to wishlist it, but never once in its ninety-minute runtime did it let me know the names of the people who made the game. Tabletop Game Shop Simulator has a button to show you the credits on the main menu, but it's greyed out in the demo; clicking on it in the full version doesn't do anything, either. I chucked the entire game into AssetRipper to pull apart the files in the vain hopes that there would be a staff roll hidden somewhere in there, but all I found was confirmation that the "Credits" button is an empty object that isn't programmed to do anything besides sit on the menu taking up space. You have to wonder why it's there at all.
That's about it. Two likely outcomes in my mind, and both of them boil down to general incompetence and corporate bloat.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
None of this matters.
The specifics of what Trap Plan are or are not getting up to in relation to companies they may or may not be working with is a completely pointless discussion on all fronts. The exact games don't matter. They have the "we will shill on Reddit for you" section of their website, and that's the part that matters. If that's what they're advertising, and if they're this open about the fact that they will astroturf Reddit for you, then consider for a moment how many organizations there must be who don't make it this clear. Really, you almost have to hand it to them. It's as honest as deceptive practices get. It's not too often you'll see a company come right out and declare that they'll act as a plant for you in exchange for a flat fee of 2,500 Euro.
Marketing, as a whole, is parasitic. It takes your attention, and it takes your money. It infiltrates high-trust spaces and turns them into low-trust spaces. It burns up the good will that communities build among themselves as fuel, and makes real people suspicious of one another. Marketers don't care. They devour whatever space you've created, and then move on to the next one. The work that these people do is antisocial, in the truest sense of the word. They are intruders who look for weak spots in communities so that they can exploit the naive and the good-willed. All for what? A handful of Steam wishlists for a bunch of shit games?
It pisses me off, because it means that I can never hear someone give a positive opinion on anything without also wondering if someone is paying them to say it. If you're not at least that suspicious, you should be. How do you know that I'm not being paid by someone in the advertising firm competition to trash these people? When I link you to these Reddit search tools or archive services, how can you be certain that I wasn't approached by the development team to plug their project? When I give a new game a good score and tell you to go play it, why take me at my word rather than assuming I was bought off?
Nobody's ever given me money or exposure or any sort of kick-back in exchange for my coverage because I'm too small of an outlet for them to ever justify it, but it fucking blows that you can't just take my word for that because these astroturfing shitheads exist. And yeah, maybe we all do need to relearn the harsh lessons about not trusting anyone on the Internet, but it makes everyone's circles smaller. It turns every website into a space where you have to verify that the people you're talking to are real human beings with real opinions. That sucks, man. I don't like doing that. I don't like having to be suspicious of my fellow man because I've been shown time and time again that these bloodless marketing reptiles are keen to dress up in human clothing and pretend to be one of us.
I don't want to pretend like all of this is okay or uplifting, because it isn't. But there's something about the fact that they have to pretend to be like the rest of us that gives me a little bit of hope. Despite everything these marketers have tried, and despite the billions and billions and billions of dollars that gets pumped into advertising year after year, they're still failing to imitate regular folk. They can't do it. They're not capable. They don't have enough of a connection to people to pass as one of us. They're too hooked into their LinkedIn metric drips and the OpenAI subscriptions that they've replaced their brains with to remember what it's like to be a person. You've got a humanity that they lack, and that they want, but can never have.
As Jeff Rosenstock once screamed down a microphone, they wouldn't be your friend if you weren't worth something.
