Valve, the creator of Steam, announced that it removed Insel Games' published titles in the digital distribution platform after the investigation revealed the publisher was manipulating game review scores.
Valve release manager Jason Ruymen confirmed the news in a post he wrote on one of Insel's game "Guardians of Ember." According to him, upon investigation of the reports about review score manipulation by the publisher, they found multiple Steam accounts controlled by Insel. Apparently, Insel has been using these accounts to post positive reviews for their games. He emphasized that what the publisher did was a clear violation of Steam's review policy and that because of this, Valve has decided to terminate its relationship with the publisher and remove all the games they published from Steam. He ended the post by stating that for players who had already purchased the games, they will still be accessible in their Steam library.
The investigation was conducted following a Reddit thread discussing the publisher's score manipulation circulated. The thread titled "Insel Games' CEO Threatened Employees to Force Positive Reviews for all Games," was started by a Reddit user named "nuttinbutruth" who shared an email screenshot that was said to have come from Insel's CEO and co-founder Patrick Streppel.
In the email, Streppel said that "Wild Buster: Heroes of Titans," the newest Insel game to be published on Steam, was unable to meet their revenue expectation. He then said that the low revenue is due to the fact that they only have six review scores. He pointed out the importance of reviews and said that the failure of "Wild Buster" will lead to unemployment for everyone in the company. To mitigate this problem, he then gave two choices for his employees — either they buy the game, present the receipt and be reimbursed within a day or explain to him why they refuse to do so.
According to Polygon, Insel issued a statement regarding what happened. Insel said that the email never meant to threaten its employees — rather, it was meant to rally the employees' support. Insel stressed that no employee was penalized for failure to buy the game. The publisher also apologized for the misleading wording in the email.
