Retnaburn

I have been wondering for many months now about the pro-Steam bots that come out of the woodwork the moment you say anything negative about Valve's store. I am not generally a conspiracy theorist but having experienced them, there is something unique here that I do not see in other patterns of user swarms on things like anti-AI games or Playstation physical discs, which I think have a larger percentage of real people to bots. Pro-Steam swarms have: 1. Many accounts with little-to-no followers, most unverified, most not following you 2. Instant community note swatting by an AI noter (says so in the descriptions of the notes) which abuses the notes systems; the bots coordinate to upvote the note so that it quickly appears 3. Absolute focus on incredibly minor, dumb points that only an LLM would care about (gross revenue of steam versus not; ironic given Steam's AI data labeling. Whoever is running the farm should label themselves!) At first you would think this would be a Valve-originated initiative, but this makes no sense. Gabe was one of the Microsoft OGs and has been a wealthy man since the 1990s. Valve is a tiny company that does no marketing because it has a printing press of money, and twitter doesn't really matter to them. Finally, and most importantly, they would never want to do something that could be traced to them. So it's not Valve. But who has financial incentive to put the money behind an operation like this? I think a lot about the large percentage of Steam usage that is in China. The Steam userbase that has Simplified Chinese as a default peaked at 54.6% of all Steam users in February 2026, though it ebbs and flows and can dip down to 30% depending on the month. The normal global client for Steam is not allowed in China; they have a China-specific version of Steam that is far more limited, and so many Chinese users access global Steam through VPNs, paying through local payment processors. I estimate that at least $30BN dollars has been spent by Chinese Steam players over the last decade, making it a huge part of Valve's business. I have always been surprised the Chinese government allowed these loopholes, as many other global services are normally unavailable, and the domestic client is so limited because it follows local laws, meaning that the government are permitting their populace to skip it. It would be very easy for the government to tell Alipay or Wechat Pay to stop processing Steam payments and the money tap from China would go off in a second. I suspect there is some financial incentive coming through here (whether the Chinese VPN networks or other places down in the payment chain) to quash any competition that would threaten the revenue coming from these Steam loopholes. I can't come up with a better theory, but am open to others from people; you know, ones who who aren't Steam bots.