I love to browse around SteamDB every single day, since that’s where I discover the majority of obscure hits I’d never otherwise hear about. This week, I noticed something extraordinary going on with one game’s player base.
And no, not in the way Banana, that awful abomination, climbed the charts by sheer… luck? No, this game shot up from just about no players to a freakishly consistent 1280. I won’t mention the game, because it’s one of those adult titles that really have no place on Steam in the first place. But there’s definitely something up with it.
From July 31 to Aug. 3, the most concurrent players this game managed to amass was five, but never less than one. Sometime on Saturday, Aug. 3, the game shot up to 1282 concurrent players, exactly. Since then, it’s never dropped below 1280, even once. But the graph itself should tell the story pretty effectively.
You don’t need to be a genius to know that the graph is unnatural as heck. But so what? Obscure games get player spikes sometimes, right? Yeah, and those new players are quick to leave a review, usually.
But this game’s last review came on October 9, 2024. Not suspicious at all!
Finally, this seems to have been just the right influx the game needed to land on SteamDB’s trending page, shown above. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem to have boosted the game’s sales by very much. This could mean that, at least, Steam’s algorithm is doing its job quite well, and not promoting the game to more players all of a sudden.
Probably because it doesn’t know who to promote the game to, because those players are all fake. Look, I could be wrong, but something certainly seems to be up here, right? What do you think? And how do you think Steam will react if developers are actually trying to artificially boost their games?
Harshly, I’d bet. It goes against the T’s and C’s, I’m willing to bet. Either way, this is a weird one, and I just had to say something.
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