How Split Fiction, World of Warships, and Other Games Astroturfed Reddit

Hey!

Yesterday I made a thread about a piece of astroturfing going on for a small game. After doing some more digging I found proof of the same company doing this kind of work for a bunch of other games including

• Split Fiction

• World of Warships

• War Thunder

• Mandragora

• Misery

• Active Matter

• Gloomy Eyes

• Bee Simulator

• Tabletop Game Shop Simulator

The company has an entire page advertising this work with examples (link is archived) and one of the people there has made posts on Linkedin showing off some work they did to astroturf reddit. None of the reddit accounts they use are marked as sponsored or give any hint they have anything to do with the games they're advertising.

Again this probably isn't the only company doing this, but it is a good look at how they operate. These kind of accounts are pretty hard to catch (unless they literally just post about doing it like in these examples) and they know that, writing that

We build them up with genuine posts, we test formats, we diversify activity. The goal is simple: when a campaign goes live, the account already looks and feels natural to Redditors.

I don't think there's a good way to stop this unless the admins actually do something, but just wanted to make this follow-up post to shine a light on some of the games abusing reddit.