The developers of Starsand Island, currently the hottest new life sim on Steam's new and trending charts behind free-to-play January release Heartopia, claim they're not behind a wave of botted reviews boosting the game's user reception.
One day into Early Access, the situation reached the point that studio Seed Sparkle Lab posted a statement "regarding artificial comments" on Steam.
"We have recently noticed a large number of overly positive 'praise' comments about our game appearing across various social platforms," the devs say.
"At first, we believed this meant our game was being recognized and appreciated. However, we soon noticed something unusual on Steam: some comments were posted after very short playtime, were released at nearly the same time (appeared to be AI-generated).
"This made us realize that something might not be right."
Seed Sparkle says it has "no concrete evidence" that this is "an attack" of some kind, but admits "it does feel as though someone may be doing this intentionally." As the studio notes, "this approach is not cheap, since leaving a review requires purchasing the game." However, the dev says "we later discovered that some of these accounts refunded the game after posting their reviews."
Pleading innocence and confusion, and hoping to "focus on building a good product," Seed Sparkle tells "whoever may be behind this, we kindly ask you to stop. Please let us focus on making our game in peace. We pose no threat to anyone."
Farming sim specialist and X/Twitter user Josh flagged a strange batch of extremely early Starsand Island user reviews posted by Steam accounts with near-identical play histories. He later posted a list of dozens of Steam accounts who seemed to fit the same profile.
I dug into several of these accounts and others by filtering for positive English reviews on Starsand Island's Steam page. It wasn't hard to spot a pattern. Very quickly, I found 15 suspect accounts.
Many of the Steam profiles listed in Josh's post are private, but almost every single one with a publicly available activity history shares a few qualities. Among the privated accounts, several share profile pictures with some of the accounts I've looked into.
These reviews, which do read awkwardly but not in a patently absurd AI type of way, were all posted by Steam users with exactly 14 games on their account and one review on record – all for Starsand Island. Many of the reviews read like a list of life sim features or selling points run through a tool like ChatGPT.
"Rainy day means no watering, perfect for scavenging all over the map. I'm a total pro at adulting," says Jornina.
"As someone who's always on a budget, this game is a literal godsend. It doesn't ask for my credit card every time I want to decorate my house or get a new pet," writes Samma.
"What looks like a casual farming game actually offers impressive depth, with farming, building, mining, and fishing all well-balanced and enjoyable," adds Inga.
All of these reviews were posted with between three and five hours of play time in Starsand Island.
Even more suspiciously, the recent activity for these users includes many of the same games. The most common game among my selection of accounts was Romance of the Three Kingdoms Maker, a December 2015 release with 343 mixed reviews total, and which notably isn't available in English on Steam.
Many accounts had recently played The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, which was released by Life is Strange studio Dontnod in September 2018. I've also seen a lot of Project Zomboid, The Descendant, and Tabletop Simulator.
All of these accounts either last played most of these games today, February 12, or hadn't touched them since some time in 2021. It seems pretty clear that there's botting going on. I've reached out to PR to ask Seed Sparkle, which is based in China, for more information.
Emma-Jane writes: I've played Starsand Island for 25 hours, and this is the most invested I've been in a cozy game for years.
