Some games involved with the review botting scheme no longer available for purchase on Steam

[P4-630]

http://store.steampowered.com/app/467460/ - ZombieRush (Developer and publisher Arthur Karievhttp://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=Arthur Kariev)

http://store.steampowered.com/app/462060 - Base Squad 49 (Developed and published by Rai Studio Games, as are the next 3 http://store.steampowered.com/search/?publisher=Rai Studio Games)

http://store.steampowered.com/app/473490/ - Rapid Squirrel

http://store.steampowered.com/app/475060/ - Electric Zombies

http://store.steampowered.com/app/467560/ - Lands Of Devestation

Further research reveals that Rai Studio Games submitted ZombieRush to Greenlight, so they're all by the same developer from Russia. http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198276115160

Worth noting:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/1930 - Two Worlds Epic Edition was in a few of the botted accounts from what I saw, but still available for purchase. Possibly the botters seeded in a few genuine keys for appearances? Or this was given away for free at some point.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/311250 - Doorways: The Underworld was also in a few botted accounts, still for sale.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/314250 - Jet Gunner, same.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/297020/ - Culling of the Cows, same.

Perhaps the evidence was just simply overwhelming for Zombie Rush and Rai Studio Games, or the devs of these games are completely innocent. Best not to jump to conclusions about the other games until Valve publishes their findings about this incident, if they do. Update:https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/4nk57a/some_games_involved_with_the_review_botting/d44o1pu All of these games were given away for free at one point, the bots likely harvested keys for looking more genuine. Poor devs, they tried to do something nice and some botting prick swiped a ton of their keys.

Given that all the games no longer for sale are from the same developer/publisher, and that person made hundreds of bots 'Steamworks Developers' for his first game, Valve probably have him pegged as guilty beyond question.

What I wonder is, is there anything fishy with the games he had on Steam and forced through Greenlight? Any malware or other malicious code in ZombieRush, Base Squad 49, etc?

If you want to inspect some of the bot reviews yourself, you can select any of the bots in the banned botting group here.http://archive.is/XW92P

EDIT Bonus: Let's look at the reviews from some of the bots now.

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198213188100/recommended/467460/

This review has been banned by a Steam moderator for violating the Steam Terms of Service. It cannot be modified by the reviewer.

EDIT2 A reminder that one of the two people behind all of this (http://archive.is/n0kSz#selection-1569.1-1569.15) was spotted on Reddit in May offering to 'help' developers get through the Greenlight process on May 15. Just how many successes has he had? http://archive.is/GojuR

At the very least, three Greenlight link command pushers were found on their bot organizing page.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=669392669
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=557371531
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=620660153&searchtext=spookie+hero

All successfully Greenlit by the 'community'.

There's also a bunch of profile links with trading tokens listed. The bots were auto-forwarding all cards and packs obtained to these accounts, I assume. How much fucking money did these botters make from cards, packs, key selling and developer kickbacks, I wonder?

EDIT3 OH BOY, we're really getting into the meat of it now. I investigated some of the trade accounts on the botter group page and this is what I found.

http://archive.is/XMpQ9 - Fried semen of hedgehog

100+ keys for the same games, sitting in his inventory. Beep, Caster and Dead Bits. A supplier to the bots to generate reviews?

Many of the others are trade banned outright, or their Steam inventory are 'not currently available'.

EDIT4

YourMove!JacobMyDear.BURN!!!!!!! (the bot master) recently got 4 games greenlight. This made him a Steamworks dev. As I understand, he would then be able to tag his alts as team members, which would give them the dev badge.

The greenlight pages for his 4 games no longer appear.

• /u/nwdsa

http://archive.is/xRN2v These four games no longer exist.

EDIT5

One of the two people in charge of the botting group no longer has their profile working. http://archive.is/JZgR1

They ran the group http://archive.is/D9b1U "Let's Help Greenlight". Gee, I wonder how the people in that group 'helped' Greenlight? The owner of it is the owner of the bot swarm, under a numerical name now. http://archive.is/lEfqG 10,110 items in their Steam inventory? Wow. Guess we know where all the cards were going now.

Not that he can use them anymore, now that he's Community Banned. http://archive.is/LmwHt And so is his co-admin of the botting group! http://archive.is/3kCtz

Really hope that Valve looks into all the developers he and his bots 'helped' to brute force their way through Greenlight, though.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/4nk57a/some_games_involved_with_the_review_botting/

 

[D007]

I called this shit 5 years ago, on steam forums. Crooked reviews.
Glad to see it's getting some attention.. IGN has been doing it, basically for as long as they've existed..