The Fascinating Problem with Free-to-play Steam Games Going Paid

Recently, as I was researching and writing the first entry to the Top-rated Steam PC Games Released Last Week, I came across a title that perplexed me. Hailed as an amazing game, RTS Banana Drama by developers Dommenuss and Pikachau, published by artifact design GbR, launched with no user reviews.

You see, Banana Drama is simultaneously very well-reviewed, with 303 total ratings, and also given the "No User Reviews" score on Steam. For newcomers and prospective buyers, the audience opinions on the title are an important factor in deciding to purchase something, yet oxymoronically, the colony sim has no reviews and 300 at the same time.

This Schrödinger's Review actually has a reason behind it, which isn't evident at first glance. Seemingly, the reviews present at the bottom of the Steam page appear to be bots, with plenty of memes (befitting Banana Drama's silly and chaotic nature), as they're all tagged for "Product received for free".

The dilemma is solved when you learn a bit more about the development cycle. You see, this silly title launched in Early Access on the 25th of July 2022, having a lengthy development cycle.

The previous update, before the 1.0 launch on the 29th of March 2026, had been a Halloween one dating back to October 2024. Though for all intents and purposes, Banana Drama seemed to be abandoned, it had accrued a surprising amount of positive reviews, with 94% of 302 users rating it favourably as of the 22nd of December 2025 (according to the Wayback Machine). Now leaving its Early Access state, Banana Drama has dropped from these glowing reviews to zero, and it's all due to how the early development was handled.

At the time of launch, the two-person development team had decided that they wanted to start the game in a free-to-play state. According to the Early Access section on the store page, the team wanted to monetise the game after the release, beginning with the free-to-play variation to get suggestions, ideas, and gather a loyal community.

Grow their community it did, with the so-called "banana crew" being active on a small Discord channel home to 341 members. It's no small feat to successfully run an Early Access development cycle throughout the span of four years, without updates for two, and not receiving a bombardment of negative reviews because of an abandoned product.

However, in a catch-22, growing this audience and gathering players to enjoy Banana Drama for free also sank the reviews to the ground, invalidating them all upon launch. Instead of bolstering impressive review numbers, Banana Drama sits among the 487 other titles that launched this previous week, having none of its 300 reviews or history of success with previous players.

A similar situation happened to Weyrdlets, now called Weyrdlets 2.0 : Desktop Pets. As the new update name alludes, Weyrdworks' previously free-to-play experience went paid, changing microtransactions and better aligning with customer wants on the 18th of March (costing just £5.89)... and similarly losing hundreds of reviews in the process.

This happens because of Steam's free product policy, where paid titles that the player received for free are excluded from final review scores. When it's working as intended, this system prevents mass reviews from bot accounts, as receiving keys from outside sources (even in the case of videogame journalists such as myself) invalidates any review done to the title.

The policy applies to all forms of "free" products. Keys received from developers, keys received from free-to-play promotions, keys received from third-party websites and bundles, anything acquired outside of the Steam platform itself... they all exclude user reviews from the final score to prevent bad actors from abusing the system.

And in turn, it's hurt Weyrdlets, Banana Drama, and who knows how many other free-to-play titles that went paid at a later date.