Crosstalk · published
After a little more than a week of the game being released on Steam, I've seen that it's not a good platform for this game after all. Games that are set to free are claimable by any Steam account, which currently includes bots or at least partially automated accounts. These accounts appear to be posting positive reviews with generic and only loosely related content to farm community rewards. Similar farming bots also appear in nearly every CS2 deathmatch, where they likely farm trading cards en masse. This is a real problem that no one seems to be addressing, and since I am building this game by myself, I don't have the capacity to answer accusations such as a recent accusation of having bought reviews. Two Russian reviews appeared on the main Crosstalk store page, neither of which I have anything to do with. Both of the posting accounts have thousands upon thousands of games claimed and they post reviews every few minutes, which is not a realistic tempo for a human. I reported both to Valve, who did nothing and kept both reviews up. I want to focus on building a game and not forum moderation and unnecessary defense of my project.
So, I decided that I will be ending my use of Steam, developer-wise, and will instead use what I should have used from the get-go, which is GitHub. I already paid Valve their $100, which included visibility on Steam, so I will trigger the full release of Crosstalk here before confirming with Valve to take the store page down.
The repository is at https://github.com/danglingptr0x0/crosstalk and will be populated during my next update shortly.
You can also join the Discord server: https://discord.gg/fscVfsuzMG