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Steam has a bot problem?


Josh
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The stats on the free Ultra App Kit indicate something strange:

  • Ultra App Kit, free licenses granted: 15046
  • First-time downloads: 171

This means that 98.8% of the activity is "fake".

My job is to make tools you love, with the features you want, and performance you can't live without.

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Here is one possible explanation: You can't use a swarm of bots to artificially raise your ranking on Steam, without spending so much money it would be unprofitable. However, you might be able to use bots to artificially depress the ranking of other products, thereby elevating your own ranking relative to them.

The newest game on Steam right now is Winnie the Pooh: The Serial Killer with an app ID of 2273510. That means there are somewhere around two million products on Steam.

It would be possible for me to create an automated process that registers new Steam accounts, and browses pages without taking any further action. This would cause the Steam ranking system to downrank those pages, since they are not converting into sales. The bots would be instructed to avoid the pages I want to not damage, so those pages would only have human traffic, and Steam would record they have a higher conversion rate, as a higher percentage of page views would result in a sale. This would result in the products I want to earn money rising in the rankings and earning more cash.

I don't know if the numbers really work out, but if they do there would be a strong incentive to set up such a system, and I guarantee you somebody has tried. Something like that seems more believable to me than the story that 99% of people add a free app to their account but then they forget to ever play it.

My job is to make tools you love, with the features you want, and performance you can't live without.

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