For example, Adam made a game and decided to sell on Steam. Steam sold 100 copies on Day 1 and tells Adam that 100 copies have been sold today. How can Adam know that Steam is not lying?
What about other platforms like GOG? What about VOD sites like Netflix and Amazon?
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It probably won’t be in Stream’s long term interest to falsify such numbers deliberately. Stream relies on many developers bringing games onto their sales/disti platform – getting a bad rep kills the interest from most developers to use them. So trying to make a few quick bucks ends up hurting their entire business model.
If it is a cloud based game, then it is not too difficult to monitor the game servers and figure out there are too many users relative to games sold. So Steam would have to be careful – ie they cannot make it obvious. At this point, the gains from cheating are small and the penalties if caught are large (lawsuits, bad reputation, other developers pulling out…)
Nearly every game now has some form of registration (voluntary or otherwise) and game web-site. It would be odd to get 1000 registrations and only reported sales of 100 (for example).
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