On August 28, just two days after Brok’s release date, Cowcat explained that the game was being targeted by some Steam curators with suspicious negative reviews. While many of these curators had hundreds of positive reviews for various other games, some had released negative curator reviews for Brok.

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What makes this more suspicious is that many of these curators only had one negative review and it was their Brok review. Cowcat claims that many of these curators had initially posted positive reviews for Brok. But then something changed. So, what happened? Well, the dev believes that an attempt on their part to filter out scammers by emailing them free codes had angered some people.

Normally, indie dev email inboxes are flooded with people requesting codes, claiming to be reviewers, critics, YouTubers, publishers, etc. As Cowcat mentions in the thread, most of these are scammers looking to get some free codes that can then be sold on shady key-selling sites. But in an effort to not accidentally ignore the few legit critics and reviewers reaching out to play Brok, Cowcat came up with a plan. They sent all these people Steam keys for the free-to-play Brok prologue, which acts as a prequel and demo to the full game. Cowcat figured people who really wanted to play the game for review purposes would use the code, see it was for the free prologue and reach out about the mistake. And while some did indeed contact the dev about the “mistake,” most didn’t, which Cowcat believes is because they didn’t want to play it, they instead just quickly sold the key via shady key sellers.

Cowcat

This move likely caused these scammers some trouble as people who bought the keys discovered they had been screwed. So Cowcat believes that some of these con artists turned to their curator pages on Steam and reviewed Brok negatively before its release. What makes these reviews very suspect is that Cowcat never gave out the full game to these people, yet their reviews claim to have played the full game.

It should be noted that any curator can review any game on Steam, even if they don’t own it or have never played it, making it even easier for people to use the old, barely updated system for fraud.

Kotaku has reached out to Cowcat and Valve.

After all this, Cowcat says they plan on reporting these Steam curators to Valve. They also further criticized the company for continuing to allow shady Steam curators and scam artists to use positive and negative reviews like this to “blackmail” indie devs. Further, they asked people to not buy games via shady key sites as the devs don’t see a dime from these sales, since the codes are often gained via scams like the one Cowcat believes these curators are involved in.

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As for how this will affect Brok, Cowcat isn’t worried as they don’t believe these curators lead to many sales on Steam. But they are still glad their thread went viral and is helping spread the word on how these types of scams continue to go unpunished on Steam.