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Alex Jones got to his position by gaming the advertisement system for self-promotion. I can't say I'm shocked to see his video game once again exploiting the Steam store's algorithm, just like he'd gamed the YouTube and Twitter algorithms before.
You'll see Ann Coulter do the same thing with book sales. Have someone straw-purchase 10,000 copies of "Smelly: The Liberal Campaign To Fart A Lot And How It Is Destroying America", and rocket to the top of the Best Seller Lists.
I think Regnery Press does that last bit all the time...I don't know if people that maintain such lists take that kind of thing into account or not. And yeah, I have no trouble believing that Lil Alex found some demon willing to help him game the Steam system.
It takes more work to find out who is purchasing the books, particularly if the publisher includes straw-purchases as part of its marketing strategy and therefore has an incentive to report their number inaccurately.
He's got enough money to simply do it himself (or outsource the process to professionals). Sort of a priming-the-pump method to marketing. Its very possible that the vig Steam gets from your straw purchases is less than the cost of paying them upfront to advertise your game. Also possible he's doing both, in which case Steam has a strong economic incentive not to discourage this behavior.
At one time the NY Times bestseller list put this dagger (†) icon at the end of the summary when it happened. That way people in the know would get it was because of bulk sales.
But I think NYT changed how they do their best seller list to be a survey of booksellers, and probably just don't include bulk sales at all anymore. But I don't know. But if you see a dagger on a bestseller list, it means shenanigans are afoot. (†)
The sad thing is that the people most likely to know about the shenanigans are the ones least likely to fall for Regnery schemes in the first place...those least likely to know are the target audience of Regnery, etc...
Yeah but it's probably well beyond the scope of making a best seller list to convince the people that have already been fooled by these scammers that these people are scammers.
Don't under estimate how many conspiracy theorists and conservatives are on Steam. A good portion of my friends list is fractured after 2016 and 2020