Steam dev accused of bribing players with freebies for positive reviews

It is not surprising that getting a positive review from players is always the goal for game developers. However, it is surprising that one Steam developer has resorted to bribery in order to boost the ratings of its game.

If you were to head over to a game called Shinobi Warfare on Steam, you would find the free-to-play RPG sitting at a respectable “overwhelmingly positive” rating. With Steam ratings going a long way to convince people to play games, seeing this impressive rating would definitely boost sales.

However, upon further inspection courtesy of DualShockers and Reddit user Glavurdon, you would see that out of 3067 reviews, a whopping 2925 are positive despite the game being less than mainstream.

There's a free Sand Land demo available to check out on Steam now.

“Why is this not breaking the Steam terms of service?” wrote Glavurdon on Reddit. Alongside their post, they also included a screenshot taken from the Shinobi Warfare Discord page which shows the developers seemingly enticing players with free in-game items.

“Hey everyone,” the message reads. “We’ve got another chance for you all to get 1000 free gems! How to do it? Download Shinobi Warfare on Steam, after playing the game you have an option to write a review. Write a positive review to our game and take a screenshot to @Zen along with sending your in-game username (login).”

Although this post was first made in 2022, it seems as though the practice is ongoing and positive reviews are still rolling in despite bribery going against Steam’s terms and services. As a result, Valve has noted the game “as containing an abnormal set of reviews that we believe are largely unrelated to the likelihood that you would enjoy the product”.

With Valve warning creators not to “artificially influence review scores”, it remains to be seen what will happen with Shinobi Warfare’s developers.