Nexon appears to be breaking Steam’s review rules with Blue Archive event
By Marco Wutz
Update (July 11, 2025, 09:49 CEST): Nexon has canceled the Steam review event for Blue Archive, stating that it "discovered that certain aspects could potentially conflict with platform policies."
It seems like the company wisely decided to better be safe than sorry and not challenge Valve's rules in regards to manipulating the review system.
The original article reporting about the event in question follows below.
The latest gacha game to arrive on Steam, Blue Archive, is a powerhouse of the genre and one of South Korea’s biggest success stories, but publisher Nexon might have been a little too eager to get the game’s user reviews on Steam rolling.
A notification posted on the game’s forum (and subsequently reposted on social media) on July 3, 2025, informed Blue Archive players about the “Steam Client Grand Opening Celebration, Steam Review Event,” which is running until July 11, 2025. As part of this event, every player will be rewarded with five Gift Choice Boxes and five Beautiful Bouquets if the game has at least 10,000 user reviews on its Steam page.
“All you need to do is play Blue Archive on Steam and leave a review! If the total number of Blue Archive reviews written on the Steam page reaches the target amount, you’ll receive event gifts,” the event description says.
While developers asking the community to write reviews is very common and appears to be completely fine, Valve has rules against soliciting reviews “in exchange for any games, DLC, money, or other rewards.”
Since “other rewards” are on the line here in connection with writing Steam reviews, this event appears to be a violation of the rules, although the fact that every player would be eligible to receive the goodies might be enough of a loophole to get away with it. This really depends on Valve's own interpretation of the rule.
As the event wasn’t advertised inside the game and the publisher didn’t ask for positive user reviews specifically, the other two rules in this section haven’t been broken, making this case relatively minor overall — still: Steam has been known to be strict about its policies, so this could potentially spell trouble for Blue Archive, if Valve decides to follow up on it.
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