ABOUT Sentinels of the Store

It's Time for Real Change

The Sentinels of the Store is a group founded on the core values of transparency, fairness, and consumer protection. Our journey began when we saw the urgent need to address the growing concerns within the Steam ecosystem. Together, we formed the Sentinels of the Store to champion the rights of both consumers and developers, ensuring that everyone in our community is treated with the respect and fairness they deserve.

What We Stand For

We are unwavering in our mission to protect consumers from malpractice and deceit. Our commitment to transparency ensures that you can trust the games you purchase and the developers you support.

We believe in fostering a healthy environment where developers can thrive without fear of exploitation or unfair treatment. By advocating for fair enforcement of policies, we ensure that all developers, big or small, have an equal opportunity to succeed.

We take a firm stance against those who seek to undermine the integrity of the Steam platform. We actively work to identify and expose bad actors, ensuring that they face the consequences of their actions.

Consistency and fairness are at the heart of our approach. We strive to assist Valve in the enforcement of Steam's policies, making sure that rules are applied equally to all, without favoritism or bias.

Our Vision

We envision a Steam community where:

Consumers are protected and informed.
Developers are respected and supported.
Policies are clear, fair, and consistently enforced.
Transparency and accountability are the norms, not the exceptions.

We believe that real change is possible, but it requires the collective effort and support of each member of our community.

Together, we can build a better Steam community for all. Stand with us, and let’s make real change happen.

Part of the Sentinel Network

The Sentinel Network is a collective of Steam curators and advocacy groups dedicated to consumer transparency, ethical reviews & fair gaming practices.

If you value honest curation, ethical gaming, and protecting players from misinformation, please do join the groups that are part of the Sentinel Network.

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E-mail: mellowonline1@gmail.com

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RECENT ANNOUNCEMENTS

Shady Developer Dumps Eighteen Games Onto Steam in One Month

21 April - HIGH CAFFEINE | 4 Comments

Over 18,000 games were launched onto Steam in just 2024 alone, not accounting for DLC or any other add-ons, which comes out to a rate of about 51 games released daily on Steam. If you’re at all familiar with the state of the Steam storefront, this probably isn’t very surprising to see, as this rate has been steadily increasing over the years. However, what most people don’t expect to see is for a bulk of the daily new releases to be published by a single developer, let alone one that hasn’t existed before March of this year.

On March 7th, 2025, a new developer would rear their ugly head by the name of WUT Studio[steamdb.info], making themself known by dumping out nine separate titles onto the storefront, all of which initially released as free-to-play. For the sake of keeping the article short, here's a small selection of their titles.

https://sp.zhabite.com/steamstore/app/3515210/Wasteland_Rangers
https://sp.zhabite.com/steamstore/app/3515260/Operation_Blackout/
https://sp.zhabite.com/steamstore/app/3515270/Freeforce_Airplanes/

Every one of these titles shares various attributes, including the use of AI generated store pages and library assets, each game being an unmodified Unity asset pack, but most interestingly, all of these games very quickly gained an unprecedented amount of reviews. Upon looking at these reviews, however, a bizarre series of trends was uncovered across all of the games, with the few English reviews being either irrelevant to the game[archive.is], typical copypasta fodder[archive.is], or completely incomprehensible dreck[archive.is]. The bulk of the reviews are written in a litany of foreign languages, including Thai[archive.is], Hindi[archive.is], Georgian[archive.is], and Arabic[archive.is], something rare to see in general, let alone on a shovelware title like this.

As is expected from obvious fake reviews, these reviews all came from accounts that had few games in their inventory, with the only reviews being for games published by WUT Studio. At the time, there was only one major question – what’s the point of all this? Fake reviews aren’t a new phenomenon for shady developers, but the games were all released free-to-play, so at the time it didn’t seem like there was a whole lot to gain.

WUT Studio proceeded to release another series of nine games on March 26th, which so far have continued the same trends as the first set.

https://sp.zhabite.com/steamstore/app/3568420/Crown_of_Chaos/

As you can see from the selected sample, very little has changed, just another garbage free-to-play game with AI generated assets, a stock asset game with zero content, and a boatload of fake reviews.

However, things started to get interesting once again, as on April 10th, one of the Sentinels member Shattered mind noticed these games had all been priced up to $1 US, and once again it was noticed by one of our moderators, Occular Malice[x.com], that all of these titles had rather suddenly raised their prices to $55 USD on April 14th[imgur.com].

This is a tactic tons of scammy developers love to use, usually as a way to prevent legitimate players form posting negative reviews while they sell keys in random key bundles on gray markets like G2A and Kinguin. Though we can’t confirm this (and frankly I don’t want to spend $5 on a bundle of crap keys to test the theory), seeing as this has been a common avenue for other scam devs like Atomik Fabrik, it’s certainly not out of the question.

That still leaves one thing, however – why are all these games launching as free-to-play? The first nine titles released still maintain a positive review score, but as they switched from free to paid, all the original reviews no longer count towards the aggregate, so new reviews had to be placed while the game was still a dollar to count. This is a bit of tricky thing to determine, there’s a chance that WUT Studio is still using the review and player count numbers to make their game seem like it meets the positive review threshold most random key bundles claim to uphold, some Steam community members have theorized that the games are cryptominers (which unfortunately isn’t implausible) - my personal theory is that whoever’s behind WUT Studio is probably unfamiliar with how Steam reviews work, and figured that the reviews would still be valid after switching his apps to paid. It’s hard to say, but I always revel in the idea that people like this are grossly incompetent, but one thing I do know is that WUT Studio isn’t the only person who’s been releasing an excess of trash in one sitting, far from it, but I think I've covered enough garbage peddlers for one day...
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Unveiling 'The Sentinel Network'

11 April - Mellow_Online1 | 4 Comments

Hello there everyone! We're very excited to bring you an announcement today.

Over the years, our group has grown so much and has been successful thus far in supercharging conversations that, many years ago, we felt weren't getting talked about and weren't getting the attention that they deserved. It's thanks to people like you that read our posts, engage with our work, make posts in our discussions, engage in our Discord, donate to our Patreon and more that we've been able to keep our momentum growing over these past few years.

Over the course of the years, while we have seen some Steam community groups that have done what we do die out, we have also been really pleased to see the emergence, particularly in the last couple of years, of other groups springing up that share very similar intentions to us. Particularly those that have a more specific niche that they tackle as opposed to our more scattershot approach of as many problems as we can discuss.

A lot of these groups we come across, like we mentioned, share very common goals to us and because of our shared interest in promoting consumer awareness and informed buying decisions on Steam, we conceptualised something that we're happy to officially announce today as 'The Sentinel Network.' A network of Steam community groups and curators in which we share resources with each other such as staff, community management, research packs into ongoing issues, and cross promoting each others work in a way that benefits both us as community group owners and Steam curators, but also to all of you who are wanting transparency and information that may not be apparent at a surface level glance.

The Sentinel Network is an alliance of Steam curators and advocacy groups working together to uphold integrity, transparency, and ethical standards across the Steam platform.

We’re a resource-sharing, collaborative network built to amplify the voices of trusted curators, provide mutual support, and champion consumer-first values in gaming. Together, we investigate shady practices, promote honest curation, and support initiatives that benefit the wider Steam community.

Our founding groups include:

Sentinels of the Store — Advocating for consumer rights and ethical practices across Steam.
Charity Games — Spotlighting games that give back, supporting charitable causes through gaming.
Review Bomb Tracking — Monitoring, analysing, and reporting review bomb trends to maintain fair visibility.
Games With Paid Reviews — Exposing paid review manipulation to keep curation honest and transparent.

While we're closed doors at the moment with us only sending invites out to specific communities that we're keen to work with, we do hope to adopt a more open door application policy as the network grows. We now all promote ourselves as being part of the network on our groups' front page and we also promote each others work within our discussion forums so that we are sharing information across all of our audiences which we think is important, informative and helpful when you're browsing Steam.

The Steam Sentinels Discord server[discord.gg] is now the official community server for both Charity Games and Review Bomb Tracking with them having dedicated text channels, so if you've come from those communities, do please join our server and make a home for yourself! We promise to make you feel welcome!

Please be sure to join all of the groups in the network and follow their curators!