For curation

Posting informational reviews on games with solicit compensated reviews. (Paid positive reviews). This doesn't automatically translate to that every single one of the reviews are illicit, usually a big portion of them. It's about the bad practice the devs are committing and that's why I track these games. We deserve to know whether the first thing you see when you enter a store page is nothing but a facade.

"How do you know the reviews are fake?" you may wonder. Well there are several ways you can easily spot it even if we ignore what's written in the review.

-It's almost always the same people that write reviews on the same games where they've been compensated to write. Check out any of our curator reviews and look at the positive ones of a certain game. Sort by one of the spikes (usually the first one) and remove the "your languages" criteria. Look in to any of the reviewers steam profiles and check their other reviews and you will see that almost all of them write positive reviews on the exact same crappy games.
Here is how it may look like https://imgur.com/a/RGjCpE1

-A lot of the games also have the "Positive review spikes" archived in the review history if you check the graph on a lot of these games. Here[imgur.com] is a very clear sample of this. After the illicit launch reviews there were 3 real reviews in total over the span of ~8 months and then boom comes 62 positive reviews in less than a month. These reviews are from the regular paid Russian reviewers who do this on a frequent basis. This has turned the game in to 97% positive with 78 reviews in total.

-A major chunk of the reviewers are Russian and I've spoken with a few of these people who leave reviews on these games and they've explained how it worked for them. Some of them are commissioned through third party Russian websites where services are sold. The consumer in this case the reviewer buys the game through steam and leaves a positive review.
The developer or the contractor for this pays out the sum spent on the game plus some extra by transferring it to the reviewer. This way the developer gets a positive review on their game and engagement that leads to more sales very cheap, (steam service fee and possible a contractor fee if used). The consumer (the reviewer) gets steam wallet money turned in to real money and makes a profit. These reviews can mislead customers into believing a game is good, when the reviews that should have been mostly negative becomes the opposite.

-90% of the reviews are on games that are not performing well or wont perform well without a bunch of positive reviews, crappy asset flip shovel-ware for example.
Character limit cutting me short so i will wrap it up here😡

Some fine fellas over at "Sentinels of the Store" has made an article on this subject, feel free to check it out here.