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By Y Press Games on November 9, 2017

Male Doll Studio (aka Hentai Room) Posts Fake Positive Reviews on their Own Games, and Fake Negative Reviews on their Competitor’s Games. Evidence Below.

Note: To hide this post from the front page for now, I edited an old post with this information. This was posted December 31, 2024.

I don’t want negative attention brought to my company. I’m taking this action as a last resort because I can’t continue to have our games sabotaged. Our company is struggling and we can’t weather more failed games due to a malicious competitor.

No matter how negative the fall out from this situation for us, it can’t be worse than what Male Doll Studio is putting us through right now. We have no choice but to expose this situation publicly.

Timeline of Events –

December 19th, 2023 – The Email Between Male Doll Studio and Y Press Games
July 10, 2024 – Male Doll Studio Sabotages Our Game Monster Lover: Balasque with 3 Fake Steam Reviews
July 25, 2024 – Male Doll Studio’s Disastrous Baradroid Launch
August 21, 2024 – Male Doll Studio Sabotages Our Game Orc Covenant with 3 Fake Steam Reviews
August 23, 2024 – Male Doll Studio Gets 10 Fake Positive Reviews For Baradroid
August 26, 2024 – Edit to Orc Covenant Review After Our Anonymous Email
August 27, 2024 – Further Edits to Cover their Trail

It’s very difficult to go back in time and accurately report on things when your enemies edit and delete the evidence frequently. I will share the screencaps I caught and recount the events to the best of my memory, but it is possible I could get dates or details wrong.

Fortunately, much of what happened was discussed and screencapped in our Staff chat, so I do have formidable evidence to back up my claims. I would not make such a horrible accusation like this otherwise. People just want to enjoy our games and escape drama. Having to draw this negative attention to us is going to leave a scar on our company that I did not want. I have no choice. Male Doll Studios is attacking our games.

December 19th, 2023

There has only been one email exchange between Y Press Games and Male Doll Studio and it was positive, polite, and supportive. We had no animosity for one another. I post this so people understand that Y Press Games did not provoke them to sabotage our games. And we still don’t know why they are doing this to us.

The email was an offer to port our games to consoles, but we agreed it wouldn’t be feasible due to the adult content. We ended the exchange in a kind and supportive manner.

July 11, 2024

We launched Monster Lover: Balasque close to midnight on July 10th. Within 2 hours of our launch, there were two negative reviews. One from the Von Lush account. One from the Melonky account. A day or two later we got another from Little Curlin. These are the three accounts we will prove that Victor Hugo Da Pieve is using to sabotage our games.

Monster Lover: Balasque has many legitimate negative reviews and we accepted responsibility for our mishandling of this game by lower the price by 50%. We are also coloring all the black and white images in Orc Covenant right now to address the issues with that game. Neither games are perfect, and we’re trying to do better.

That said, the first reviews set the tone for the success or failure of a game. On Itch, where the game was not sabotaged by three negative reviews, it’s selling well with positive feedback.

When a game starts out with three malicious reviews, others who wish to leave a review are influenced. They don’t want to seem like they’re arguing with the first reviewers. They don’t want to seem stupid to say a game is good when three others already came to say it’s bad.

I don’t claim this game would have been a success without the attacks, but I do claim it would not have been pushed into the ‘Mostly Negative’ percentage rating on Steam. Orc Covenant would not have been pushed into ‘Mixed’.

At the time when the negative reviews were posted on Monster Lover: Balasque, I did not suspect any foul play. I did not realize what was going on until later. At this point my evidence was only circumstantial:

The Von Lush and Melonky accounts both had one sentence reviews for Pummel Party and Among Us, one or two sentence positive reviews for Male Doll and Hentai Room games, and only review that was a long diatribe. That was the negative review for Monster Lover: Balasque. Their accounts are private now, but reviews can’t be kept private: Melonky Reviews, Von Lush Reviews

Melonky deleted all the reviews they could after the anonymous email in the timeline, however, I took screencaps for my case with Steam, and they are on the bottom of this post.

Little Curlin didn’t bother with fake authentic-looking reviews. They just have reviews bashing our game and praising Hentai Room and Male Doll games.
The Von Lush account was public at this time, and had a Brazil flag. Male Doll Studios is located in Brazil. (I know this proves nothing, please stay tuned for my actual evidence.) Little Curlin is still public as I write this and also has a Brazil flag. Screencaps on the bottom.
Melonky and Von Lush deleted their negative reviews from Monster Lover: Balasque after the damage was done to move on to leaving negative reviews on Orc Covenant when it launched. This way they could not be accused of targeting us. (Little Curlin kept the negative review for ML up, but deleted the review for Orc Covenant after the anonymous email in the timeline.)

I managed to find a screencap showing proof of the Melonky review on Monster Lover: Balasque, because as stated, it was deleted later. If you go to Monster Lover: Balasque now, you will not find their review, or that of Von Lush. Please note the date of this review in the screencap, July 11, in case they see this and post the review again to try to discredit me. The game title is in the URL.

July 25th, 2024

The Lightbulbs Start Going On

On this date Male Doll Studio launched Baradroid. This is the game I’d offered to do a Kickstarter Promo swap with them on our one email exchange. They never ran the Kickstarter.

Without the Kickstarter money they apparently reduced their scope and launched a paired down version of the game. They got negative reviews for this.

Someone pointed out to me that their reply to a negative review seemed to be mentioning Y Press Games indirectly. The original reply is pasted below. If you look at their review replies now, they have edited them all to say something different (again after the anonymous email).

There was a second review comment along the same lines which made us believe they were talking about us and the situation we dealt with our game Oni Onsen. This reply was also edited by them later and I didn’t screen grab it when I had the chance.

In the back of my head I was realizing that Male Doll Studio didn’t like us. But the idea that they would sabotage our games like this was unconscionable to me. I did not think they would do something like that.

August 21, 2024

Orc Covenant launched.

The same day, I already had three negative reviews. One from Von Lush. One from Melonky. One from Little Curlin. Again, two of these accounts had one sentence positive reviews for both Pummel Party and Among Us, short positive reviews for Male Doll Studio and Hentai Room games, and two very long and detailed negative reviews for Monster Lover: Balasque and Orc Covenant. (The Little Curlin account didn’t bother with the fake reviews on authentic-looking games to my memory.)

Screencaps of the three accounts reviews I managed to catch are on the bottom of this page. Melonky deleted the fake positive reviews on Hentai Room and Male Doll games. Von Lush has not deleted their fake positive reviews on Hentai Room and Male Doll games as of today, but there are the screencaps in case they do. Neither has Little Curlin. Little Curlin’s account is all positives for Male Doll and Hentai Room, and one long negative remaining for my game Monster Lover.

I was sure that our games were being targeted by these obvious dummy accounts. I started to suspect it was Male Doll/Hentai Room.

August 23, 2024

After several days of negative reviews on Baradroid, there were suddenly 10 positive reviews on Baradroid, all posted on the same day. August 23rd, 2024. My staff and I noticed and laughed about it. It was obvious they had bought a 10-pack of fake reviews to manipulate their Steam rating. One of the reviews is the same kind of ASCII sexy art that Little Curlin used for his fake review of their other game.

The positive reviews were all garbage. One or two sentences, ASCII images, or from accounts that had 3,000-17,000 other games. Strangely, these prolific players usually only had one gay game on their account: Baradroid.

A company that would deceive players and manipulate their Steam reviews like this absolutely might be posting negative reviews on my games. Especially since those two accounts that posted the negative reviews had also posted positive reviews for Male Doll Studio/Hentai Room Games. And Monster Lover: Balasque sales data told me all the accounts were from Brazil. (I have proof of this for Little Curlin on bottom).

I believed it was Male Doll Studio/Hentai Room attacking me, but I didn’t have any hard evidence to go to Steam with.

August 26, 2024

I felt I should give Male Doll Studio a chance to take down the reviews before possibly destroying their livelihood by reporting them to Steam. However, I didn’t do this directly. I posted on my public Discord that I was going to report an unnamed competitor to Steam unless the malicious reviews were taken down.

Then I went to an anonymous email service and sent one sentence to Male Doll: Are they talking about you on the Y Press Discord Server?

I did things in this stupid way so I had plausible deniability in case Male Doll wanted to claim I was harassing them. (I’ve unfortunately dealt with trolls before, and a victim mentality is their go-to tactic.)

The day after, I checked to see if the reviews were taken down. They weren’t, but there was a notable update to the Orc Covenant Melonky review:

Melonky’s account is private. How are people on our Discord messaging them? (How can you message someone on Steam even if there account isn’t private?) I had sent an email to Male Doll Studio. I now had proof that at least the Melonky account was Male Doll sabotaging me.

August 27, 2024

The next day after the email, Male Doll Studio cleaned up much of the other evidence, further indicating to me that it was in fact them targeting us, and using these three accounts:

They edited their two developer responses on the negative Baradroid reviews so it no longer looked like they were calling out other devs.
They deleted all the fake positive reviews to Hentai Room and Male Doll Studio games that the Melonky account had posted. (Except one that was marked by Steam that they couldn’t delete.)
They switched the Von Lush account to private.
They deleted the fake negative reviews left by Von Lush and Melonky on the Monster Lover: Balasque game.
They deleted the fake negative review left by Little Curlin on Orc Covenant. This way their fake accounts only looked like they had negatively reviewed only one of my games each.

The fact that all three of these accounts went into clean-up mode after I sent an email to Male Doll tells me that these are Male Doll accounts. (If it wasn’t already obvious.) Why are you deleting past reviews you posted on our games if not to hide the fact that you are targeting us?

Melonky and Von Lush both had generic reviews for Pummel Party and Among US, positive reviews for Male Doll Studio and Hentai Room games, and long bad reviews for my games. You can match the URLs to see which screencaps go together. Sorry for the censored thumbnails. I guess I wasn’t logged in at time.

The red game on the bottom of the 2nd screencap is Monster Lover: Balasque. A review that Male Doll deleted.

Today is Dec 31st and we’re about to launch a new game tomorrow. If they come back to attack me again I have to make this public. I don’t want to. I just want them to leave me alone and take down the malicious reviews. I’m a lesbian and they are also LGBTQ. We have enough people in the world against us. We shouldn’t be attacking each other.

Some of the 10 Fake Baradroid Reviews all posted on August 23rd, 2024, below.