If the first thing you look at on a game’s Steam page is the aggregated review rating, you may want to take a closer look at that rating. A Steam developer has discovered that the “developer” and “publisher” fields can easily masquerade as review scores if your studio name is “Very Positive”.
The developer’s quirky name was picked up on the GameDiscoverCo newsletter and later tweeted by Patrick Klepek, with a screenshot of the Emoji Evolution game from developer Very Positive.
While the actual game has mixed recent reviews and mostly positive reviews, you could be fooled by seeing “Very Positive” ratings at a glance. “Emoji Evolution is a new take on the alchemy game where you have to combine different elements to find a new one,” the description read. “Find all the recipes and solve mankind’s most important dilemma.”
This appears to be the only game developed or published by Very Positive, and it doesn’t look like other studios have followed the brutal strategy – no one uses the more impressive ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ rating as a developer name, for example.
It’ll be interesting to see if Steam thinks this cheeky little fix is worth doing anything about, whether that means taking separate action against developer Very Positive or simply changing the way developer names are used. are being displayed. Since this trick wouldn’t change the way games are ranked or displayed from the store page, it probably won’t give Emoji Evolution too much unfair advantage.
