Your claim was that it never happened, this was just a single well known example of it happening.

At that point, Valve says a team of people will investigate those anomalies, and, if they determine that something fishy is afoot, they’ll “mark the time period it encompasses and notify the developer.” If Valve finds that coordinated review bombing has indeed occurred, any reviews posted during that time period won’t count toward the game’s review score.

Also it isn't fully automatic. Valve claims that people are involved 'evaluating it', and the result of the evaluation was that reviews were not counted.

https://kotaku.com/superhot-game-gets-review-bombed-after-removing-depicti-1847352470

This was in direct response to changes in the game, any negative reviews because of changes made to the game are legitimate reviews, not a 'review bomb'.

triggering Valve’s anti-review-bombing tech to kick in and filter out the flood of bad-faith evaluations.

https://kotaku.com/valve-says-it-will-remove-off-topic-review-bombs-from-s-1833332643

“We’re going to identify off-topic review bombs, and remove them from the Review Score.”

Of course Steam is the arbiter of what they deem 'off-topic'

Because until we see it, unedited, we don't really know the truth of what occurred.

Good to see people would rather be ignorant and make assumptions than understand what actually happened in an incident.

and valve got 30% of that.. for basically doing nothing more than hosting a store page. If you're wondering why we don't have Half-life 10 by now.

@PlasticExistence@lemmy.world This is on the microblog, not the main thread posting area.

They lowered the cut for people who didn't need it. Massive publishers selling tons of games. Arguably indie games that only sell a few copies need a larger cut than EA on their latest blockbuster.

There isn't much in the way of scale here. Their bandwidth isn't monitored on a per game basis, and if that was a factor in the cost they'd be basing the cut on the size of your game. Some 1 gb indie game pays the same cut or larger than a 100gb mammoth from EA. Valve is also way more strict with that indie game in getting itself published than they are with the EA game as well.

They do prevent you from linking to your own store within your Steam game though. Even though they don't provide a complete solution for things like microtransactions and DLC.

How it works on Steam:

1. User makes an in-app purchase using the steam wallet integration
2. Steam processes the payment taking 30% and gives you a reference number for that transaction
3. You query that transaction every time the player logs in to see if they've refunded it or not. That transaction doesn't actually contain any information about what they bought though.
4. You then maintain a separate purchasing server whose whole job it is is to keep a record of what the player purchased in reference to that transaction number.

For that Valve wants 30% of in-app/DLC purchases. At that point it's stripe and nothing more. Unlike standalone DLC Or expansions, these unlock purchases don't come with serving any additional content in the form of downloads.

If you make your own service to handle these transactions (with only a 3-4% transaction rate) Valve will prevent you from linking to it, or mentioning it anywhere on your page, forums or within the game itself. You need to direct players elsewhere and then mention it. Even for cross-platform games where having Steam maintain a transaction list for a portion of the users is just a needless additional layer.