By: Mellow Online | Store Sentinels [Steam]
Guest Contributor
The Steam Curator system has been around for a good long while. Having been introduced exactly 10 years ago back in September 2014, it has both been a force for good and a force not so good in the Steam ecosystem. You have your genuinely good curators such as PC Gamer and Just Good PC Games that make use of their curators to publicize what they do recommend, and what they don’t recommend. You have more informative curators such as Charity Games alerting users to when game revenue gets donated to charity and where the money goes. You have also got the exceptional Sentinels of the Store curator calling out bad actors and raising consumer awareness and publicity of bad actors on Steam, but I may be a bit biased with that. However, you also have some very bottom-of-the-barrel kind of curators. The sort such as your Critiquing Doge sort of curators, or Commander Shepard that post your meme type of curations. But even with them just being dismissed as meme-worthy and unhelpful, that still isn’t touching upon the worst of the curation system, and that’s with regards to fake curators.
A fake curator is what I refer to when a curator artificially inflates their follower count through means that don’t reflect engagement with the page (such as with unaffiliated giveaways forcing people to follow the page, creating bot accounts, etc.). A large number of curators do this and have been doing this for years, partly it seems to get free games off of developers and then also give game keys away to their community, or, in a case that was presented to me recently, resell keys onto key reselling sites such as Kinguin. This is another reminder for indie developers to use Steam’s built-in Curator Connect if you’re sending keys to curators, it’s for your protection.
I was recently contacted by a user, shout out to Emiliano on Discord, who showed me a trick that Steam seems to use in its back-end systems on how to spot these fake curators. However, when Valve was reached out to talk about this trick, they quickly patched it up partially, which was annoying for us, but still, it seems it’s getting put to use. Emiliano showed me the endpoints of some of these curators. On these endpoints, it would have two different metrics. One showed the public follower count, but then a second one marked as “High Value Followers” which always without fail showed a smaller amount. One consistency we noticed is that when we visited game store pages and went to the curator page, these curators were not ranked in order of their public followers, but were ranked on their “High Value Followers” metric. As can be seen on the Five Nights At Freddy’s: Into the Pit curator page, the AllGames 2.0 curator, despite having only 18.8K followers, is ranked higher in the top curators filter than Cheating Is Bad Mmmkaayy despite it having 26.3K followers. It’s because Steam doesn’t go off this number, it goes off the high-value figure. Here are a couple of screenshots of the system before Valve patched this up, and a few notable “fake curators”
Now, just because a group has illegitimate followers doesn’t mean that the curator is automatically “fake” in my eyes. We ran a test on my own Sentinels of the Store and were surprised to see that just over 1,000 followers were marked as low value. But that leads us to my next question: what is a “low-value follower”?
There’s little to no information about what this quantifies as. If I were to make an informed assumption, a lot of the curators we saw that ranked consistently lower, such as the ones above, were curators that received followers from game giveaways such as Gleam. I’d theorize that while this isn’t the only metric, Steam may look at how active followers engage with the page, if user profiles are limited and if accounts are suspected bots among other things.
It doesn’t stop there either. Long-time followers of Sentinels of the Store will know just how many bad actors are on the store, and Valve back in June 2018 launched developer homepages, a means for developers to offer more customization in how they list their game libraries on Steam to make it more vibrant and interesting. However, something to note, is that this was built upon the existing Steam curator system. That’s why developer homepages look and act so much like Steam curators.
What this has all led to is users can ignore curators/developers to help further customize their store feed recommendations, telling Steam they don’t want x curator or x developer’s games to influence the algorithm that displays games to the end user. Not just that, users who don’t want to be duped by fake curators such as those mentioned above, and those not wanting to endorse negative behavior from certain developers, also make use of these tools to allow them to browse Steam more freely without falling into any pitfall traps. The key problem though: the cap is shared across developers and curators because they’re both built upon the same system.
It’s become easier more than ever, both with the rise in fake curators, and the rise in fake developers, but the consistency of keeping the cap the same has become more problematic as of late, so much so, that the discussion on whether Steam should raise the cap has been reopened again.
Now, there have been users calling to mandate developers/publishers all having their own homepage, as some users cite it as a way around users ignoring a certain developer. I feel this isn’t appropriate at this stage, mainly because the customization for the end user to further narrow down games within a developers’ catalog via a homepage is too limiting at this time compared to a regular Steam search, and I feel before Steam were to put any kind of mandate in for developers to have to make use of, what is in my opinion, a much more limiting and worse browsing system, improvements must be made first. Let me show you.
Take Valve’s homepage for example. Admittedly, you have a very nice visual design which is very appealing. Categorized lists are also neat, however, when you scroll to the bottom to see the complete list, this is where the limitations come in, particularly comparing it to the search term, which is currently the default unless a developer/publisher makes a homepage.
On developer home pages, there are no:
Filter by review score
No sort by name
No sort by price (only an option to sort by discount)
No means to filter by language (you can only change these if you do so in Steam settings)
No means to sort by Steam Deck
No means to narrow by price
No option to hide free-to-play titles
Limited search based on the number of players (homepages have options to search multiplayer and co-op titles, the search term can search based on PvP, Online, LAN, split-screen, cross-platform, and much more)
No means to filter by feature, such as achievements, controller support, trading cards, etc.
In short, there are a lot of features the developer homepages don’t have in comparison to the Steam search functionality, which is why even to this day, I avoid using developer homepages where I can, just down to the poorer means to filter through games quickly and easily. I feel the proposition to force this onto other users would not be fit for purpose until Steam fixes some of the homepages’ shortcomings.
However, with that being said, at this stage, given all the discussions we have had and continue to have on fake curators and fake developers, I would propose that Steam needs to see about lifting the cap, either to 100 each or 200 cumulative, and then we can revisit this if there are still consistent complaints coming in. You can’t expect that a cap that was introduced 6 years ago will still be sufficient as fake pages continue to crop up. Steam is working on mitigating the damage and is reducing its visibility, but if Steam’s focus is still on the community to curate their store, the focus needs to be on the community having more ability to filter their store discoverability and include allowing them to ignore curators that they know are dubious, and ignore developers who are deceptive and immoral.
You can follow Mellow on X.com @ https://x.com/MellowOnline1
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