Starsand Island Developers Deny Allegations of Fake Steam Reviews, Urging Culprits to Cease Actions

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Subscribe for a weekly roundup of the most important movie and TV news, delivered straight to your inbox. From exclusive trailers to interviews and reviews, we’ve got you covered. Get sneak previews, exclusive contests, and details about special events each month! The developers of Starsand Island, currently making waves as a top life sim on Steam, have addressed concerns about a surge of suspiciously positive reviews that may be artificially inflating the game’s reception. Just one day into Early Access, the studio Seed Sparkle Lab issued a statement on Steam regarding these “artificial comments.” “We’ve recently observed a flood of overly positive ‘praise’ comments about our game across various platforms,” the developers stated. “Initially, we thought this was a sign of our game being well-received. However, we soon noticed something odd on Steam: some comments were posted after very brief play sessions and appeared to be generated around the same time, suggesting they might be AI-generated.” “This raised our suspicions that something was amiss.” Seed Sparkle admits it has “no concrete evidence” of any malicious intent but acknowledges that it feels like someone might be orchestrating this. They pointed out that “this tactic isn’t cheap, as leaving a review requires purchasing the game.” However, they later found that some accounts had refunded the game after posting their reviews. Expressing confusion and a desire to focus on creating a quality product, Seed Sparkle appealed to “whoever may be behind this” to cease their actions, stating, “Please let us concentrate on developing our game in peace. We pose no threat to anyone.” Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more Farming sim enthusiast and X/Twitter user Josh flagged a peculiar cluster of early Starsand Island user reviews from Steam accounts with strikingly similar play histories. He later shared a list of numerous Steam accounts that seemed to fit this pattern. I investigated several of these accounts and others by filtering for positive English reviews on Starsand Island’s Steam page. It quickly became apparent that there was a pattern. I identified 15 suspicious accounts. Many of the Steam profiles mentioned in Josh’s post are private, but nearly all of those with public activity histories share certain traits. Among the private accounts, several have profile pictures that match some of the accounts I examined. These reviews, while awkward, don’t read like typical AI-generated content. They were all posted by Steam users with exactly 14 games on their accounts and a single review on record – all for Starsand Island. Many of the reviews resemble a list of life sim features or selling points that could have been generated by 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 playtime in Starsand Island. Even more suspiciously, the recent activity for these users includes many of the same games. The most common title among my selection of accounts was Romance of the Three Kingdoms Maker, a December 2015 release with a total of 343 mixed reviews, notably not available in English on Steam. Many accounts had recently played The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, released by Life is Strange studio Dontnod in September 2018. I also noticed a lot of activity around Project Zomboid, The Descendant, and Tabletop Simulator. All of these accounts either last played most of these games on February 12 or hadn’t touched them since sometime in 2021. It seems pretty clear that there’s some botting involved. 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.