Every so often, I liked to Cover Kickstarter Campaigns for games that appeared promising, and Between the Stars by Isolated Games was one such case. They actually sent me a key for the demo back in October when their Kickstarter campaign was live, and it came with a note asking that anyone covering the demo mention it, their discord, and a couple of Twitter accounts for the studio and developer. I’d have ignored that if I didn’t like the demo, but it was entertaining enough that I went ahead and obliged. Time passed and I forgot about the game until its name started popping up again, and I requested a review key when it quietly popped into early access on Steam and GOG, only for the request to be denied. That’s not unusual since requests are always hit-and-miss, depending largely on the PR person in question, humidity, and whether Mercury is in retrograde, but the snub certainly stung a little more considering that they had previously offered a demo key I hadn’t even asked for.

Then I went ahead and checked the note that had come with that demo key and noticed that the link to the Kickstarter campaign that Isolated Games had provided ran through their own site and had been quietly rerouted to their Steam page. Effectively, they used the Kickstarter coverage to build up a link farm that allows their store page to rank higher in search engines. This is deceptive and scummy behavior of the highest order, and I won’t be covering Kickstarter campaigns anymore as a direct result. I’d have been willing to link to the store page, but having links magically turn into other links months later is an absolutely disgusting tactic that I’m pretty sure runs afoul of Google’s own guidelines.

Shame on you, Isolated Games.

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