A player writes a ridiculous comment on Steam highlighting an issue that the platform has been facing for some time.
What a bold comment! A player asked in the discussion area of the upcoming horror game “Inferius” on Steam if he could get the game for free. He claimed to be quite a big YouTuber with 200 subscribers and could be paid for a good review.
Moreover, he would give a negative review if he didn’t get the game for free. About 3 days after creating the thread, he commented: “I don’t like it when my patience is tested.”
You can watch a trailer for the horror game on Steam here:
Steam has a problem with clowns
What is the problem? The Steam user is likely trying to troll with the post and farm the so-called clown awards. Particularly, the statement that he is quite a big YouTuber with 200 subscribers seems to many users on Reddit as an obvious hint at his intentions.
The clown award is part of the Steam Awards, which players can give to various content (such as reviews or community postings) on the platform. With the different awards, players can express what they think of the respective content – a heart reward, for example, shows approval or that something touched their heart. The clown reward is primarily used to show that someone finds the content ridiculous.
The author of the Steam post in the community area of “Inferius” seems to want to provoke and deliberately aims to receive clown awards with his troll comment – not because it is particularly funny, but because he is perceived as particularly bold, “stupid,” or ridiculous.
This practice is also referred to as “clown farming.”
What does clown farming bring? When a content on Steam receives an award, the creator of the content gets credited a portion of the Steam points that were spent on the award.
In the case of the clown award, users are said to receive about 200 Steam points per award. The respective user has thus earned over 22,000 Steam points with more than 110 clown awards without much effort, which he can spend in the platform’s point shop on various profile backgrounds, emoticons, and avatars. 115 points correspond to a purchase price of 1 euro.
The clown award has been criticized by Steam users for some time now. Earlier this month, we reported on MeinMMO that some gamers are now demanding its abolition: A Steam award is so unpopular that thousands of players are now demanding its abolition
