Jim Sterling’s investigation of YOLO Army.

Then there’s the issue of giveaway and booster groups. This is a semi-recent trend that both illustrates the necessity of the Digital Homicides’ mission on Steam and also casts it in something of a hopeless light. Not every Steam group that does game and item giveaways is shady, but many of them are. Some, like the infamous YOLO Army, pair their giveaways with Greenlight vote promotions. The result? Thousands of people (YOLO Army’s current membership is a hair over 68,000) blindly voting for sometimes-horrific games in hopes of winning free stuff. The Digital Homicides have recently worked to get the word out about some of these groups, but many of the people powering them don’t give a shit. They just want free stuff.

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Games might get reported, but developers can just resubmit them. Games might get flagged as “incompatible” with Steam, but then they get un-flagged. Then re-flagged. Then un-flagged again. Developers might be revealed as scam artists, but they can just come back under different aliases. Their games might be bad, but they can flag negative reviews and get them taken down. Or they can sell bundles of slapdash games for peanuts and make a killing on Steam trading cards, because at that point quality is moot.

The Digital Homicides are happy to give developers advice on how to do Greenlight the right way, and a few developers even count themselves as members of the group. During our conversation, Tryyton stated multiple times that he’s happy when developers become “better” after interacting with the Digital Homicides. They’ve even tried to reach out to one of their arch-nemeses, BMC, on a few occasions. However, that didn’t exactly end well:

Image for article titled The People Fighting To Keep Crappy Games Off Steam
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Image for article titled The People Fighting To Keep Crappy Games Off Steam

The group occasionally highlights good Greenlight games as well, although their regular GreenWatch series tends to focus on sleazy and otherwise questionable practices. That said, if you need a roadmap to help guide you through the lawless land that is Greenlight, GreenWatch is about as good as it gets.

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When the Digital Homicides aren’t talking about individual games and developers, they host lengthy discussions about Steam and its pitfalls. The phrase “constructive criticism” is thrown around a lot. These are people who can see, closer-up than many, each and every crack in the foundation. As a platform, Steam is full of holes that exploitative types can worm their way into. The Digital Homicides, Steam users, and developers all want the same thing: change. Everyone can agree that it’s long overdue.

Tryyton said that he hopes to see Valve make some serious changes to Steam and Steam Greenlight, because he wants to see good smaller developers reap the rewards. “Those who would really benefit the most are the indie developers who are the needle in the haystack. The ones you hope to find and want to support. Those devs are also happy about groups like us, I think,” he said.

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