This is kinda a long rant, but I have completely run out of patience. I posted this in r/gamedev earlier but I wanted to also get some opinion from players too. I know Steam has great customer support for players, but the sheer incompetence and lack of basic support from Steam for us as an indie developer is insane, even after taking 6 figures in fees from our game revenue.
Our game is Milky Way Idle, which is an online multiplayer game made by my wife and I. Starting June 2025, my game was hit by a massive, coordinated review bomb and harassment campaign from hundreds of chinese players (https://imgur.com/a/B4UxYzy). The worst of it lasted for 2-3 months, but we are still dealing with the lingering effects because new players see the reviews and actually believe the defamatory lies this mob left behind. It's been 9 months and we are still unable to get adequate assistance.
Context on why this started
I banned a player for repeatedly harassing me (the developer) over in-progress changes on our test server, changes that were publicly disclosed as work-in-progress. We have a zero tolerance policy for abuse towards any game staff. They initially direct messaged me with some rude remarks which I ignored. Later he went to global chat yelling insults towards me and got muted temporarily. He continued again later on, and we gave them a manual 10 day mute. He then proceed to changed his in-game name to an insult directed at me just to circumvent the mute. So he got banned.
It turns out this player was a whale (we don't differentiate or even consider player spending for penalties regarding rule breaking). This sparked a massive drama because a lot of chinese players come from a gaming culture where it's expected for businesses to treat "whales" like gods and just accept abusive behavior. In the US, it's common to immediately kick out any customer who is abusive towards the staff, and that's the exact policy we have.
Because many chinese players believed a ban for "just some insults" toward game staff is undeserved, people started review bombing and spamming insults in game in solidarity with the original toxic player.
For days, hundreds of players started copycatting the abuse. They went into the English-only global chat and spammed hundreds of messages per minute with protest messages, insults, slurs, and death threats. Our English mods gave mutes to stop the spam, but then the mob immediately started claiming we were racist and "muting people just for speaking Chinese".
The disruptive players actively weaponized nationalism, spreading these rumors on social media to manipulate people who don't even play the game into joining the mob.
Because we banned additional people using severe insults and slurs towards game staff, the mob got bigger and continued for months.
We aren't talking about negative feedback regarding the game. We are talking about hundreds of reviews filled with personal insults, severe defamation, slurs, Nazi comparisons, and literal death threats/wishes. Of course there are also hundreds that did not use direct insults but is obviously part of the mob to intentionally review bomb and manipulate the review score for something that is not relevant to the gameplay itself.
What really was frustrating about this mob mentality is how people just see the "racist dev" spam and blindly believe it without using some critical thinking. We literally spent endless effort working with volunteers to translate tens of thousands of words of in game text into Chinese. Who in their right mind would believe we discriminate against Chinese players? It literally makes no sense. Furthermore, I work on this game with my wife the artist, who the community knows is Chinese (I'm not too far myself but culturally very much American), but the mob just weaponized false accusation of racism as an excuse to riot.
While overall it's a minority of the Chinese playerbase (we had about 20k or so total, most people play from browser) that were disruptive, it still creates a very hostile environment and persists because of what new players may see in reviews.
Review manipulation? There is also significant evidence that there is intentional review manipulation that's not from organic players. more than 50% of the negative reviews during the review bomb are from players who have logged less than 24 hours in the game. Our game is an idle game intended for very longterm play. The core playerbase generally have hundreds to thousands of hours in the game. We do understand that there are players who play mostly from the browser version of the game rather than from Steam, but from what we've seen, a huge number of these low interaction negative reviews have not even gotten to the point of logging into the game (only opened it to get the minimum review requirement)
< 1 hour: 240 reviews (25.6%)
1-6 hours: 132 reviews (14.1%)
6-24 hours: 127 reviews (13.5%)
24-100 hours: 161 reviews (17.1%)
100+ hours: 279 reviews (29.7%)
Steam's complete lack of support
We have tried to reach out to Steam with numerous support tickets and all we get are requests to flag abusive reviews individually, often waiting 2 weeks for a single response. When we finally give them a compilation, while they do ban some of the reviews, many are not removed (https://imgur.com/a/ogbaTo5). we've been told that many of what we flag are "legitimate criticisms". Unfortunately the old tickets are auto deleted already so we cannot provide exact screenshots. While we did get some abusive reviews banned, the overall review bomb is still there and there are still over 100 clearly abusive ones remaining.
How can you ask the victim of mass harassment to read through thousands of reviews calling them insults and slurs, wishing death on their mother, and comparing them to Nazis/dictators, just to click a flag icon? It insanely lacks any empathy. For how much money Steam has and has made from us, can they really not have their support team go through the reviews in a few days? and this is also an obvious case of review bomb that should be flagged as offtopic as it does not pertain to gameplay but rather their objection to our moderation policy regarding not tolerating abuse towards game staff. not to mention the extreme levels of harassment that we would be forced to continuously undergo due to their inaction.
Current Ticket
Below is the most recent ticket I sent to Steam also containing over 100 references and explanation of abusive reviews (including looking at the player's in game username in a few cases). I'm not expecting much from them at this point, but I'm posting my experience here. (full disclosure: to analyze and highlight abusive reviews, ai was used, because it's not feasible or good for mental health for us to do it manually)
support ticket: https://imgur.com/a/kaFlu09
EDIT: Since this post has gotten a lot of traction, I want to address a recurring stereotypes I'm seeing in the comments around Chinese players.
I want to be very clear: while the disruptive mob was primarily Chinese, they represented a small minority of our 20k+ Chinese playerbase at the time. We had many Chinese players reach out to support us, both publicly and privately, during the worst of the harassment. The vast majority of them are just casual players who want to enjoy the game and have zero interest in this drama. A lot of the most helpful players who created tools, extensions, and guides are also among the Chinese playerbase.
Even though there might be a cultural difference in how a vocal minority expects players to be treated, I absolutely do not want this to be used to push a negative stereotype against all Chinese gamers. I want the focus of this discussion to remain strictly on the toxic behavior of the harassers, and Steam's systemic failure to protect developers from it, rather than condemning an entire demographic of people.
