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Over the years, Valve has introduced a great many important features to Steam, most of which are fairly useful for the end-user, like effectively universal cloud saves, game activation keys, the modding workshop, and many others. Some of them, however, are extremely prone to abuse by malicious third parties, and the Curator feature may be at the top of this list.
Following an exposé by the developer of Brok the InvestiGator, Cowcat, Valve has banned over 20 Steam Curator pages due to owners attempting to scam game keys from developers to resell them on the gray market. The unfolding of the events was kept track by Reddit user HeyStudio90, who posted about this issue on game developer subreddits in an attempt at proving just how widespread and commonplace these scams are.
While the Steam Curator feature was being abused at launch, back in 2014, quantifying the issue has been difficult over the years. Cowcat, however, had taken it upon itself to figure out what was up due to player reviews being almost unanimously positive, only for Curators to issue predominantly negative reviews for Brok the InvestiGator. Like every other indie developer, Cowcat too received "tons" of game key requests ahead of Brok's release, but the company only provided them with limited access prologue keys for the game, with the intent of giving full keys to those Curators who end up asking for them via legitimate channels.
According to Cowcat's findings, the malicious Curators never actually activate the game keys provided by the developers, but attempted to resell them via shady marketplaces like G2A instead. When the buyers of these keys realized that they didn't get the full game keys but just the prologue, they likely complained to curator accounts (many of which seem to be connected with a single administrator), who subsequently ended up leaving negative reviews for Brok the investiGator to take revenge on Cowcat.
Thankfully, the wealth of evidence about these Curators' activities and malicious behavior made its way back to Valve, as they all seem to have been banned now. Valve is taking a more proactive approach to ridding its platform from toxicity, by the looks of it. Just recently, Steam removed Domina due to developer's transphobic rants in patch notes, promising a better gaming environment for all users of the platform.
Of course, even though a whole slew of extortionist Curator accounts has now been removed, Steam still has a huge problem in regard to how the feature is handled. Cowcat's experience was just one of the most prominent and visible examples of this taking place, and it would've been ignored had the developer not taken things into its own hands. Valve recognized the potential for this feature's abuse early on, with Steam Curators needing to disclose endorsements since 2015, yet this is clearly not the only problem with the system, and it remains to be seen if systemic fixes are being worked on.
Brok the InvestiGator is available now on PC.
Source: Reddit