Who We Are (Patreon)

Sentinels of the Store/Steam Sentinels is a community group founded by Mellow_Online1, an independent video games journalist. formerly of TechRaptor. The group is focused on shedding light on malpractice and bad actors on the popular PC digital storefront, Steam. The group prides itself on standing up for consumers, and developers while holding the bad actors to account against Valve policy and holding Valve to account for the consistent enforcement of their policies.

We have been instrumental in a number of inciting incidents on the Steam store, such as the at the time, largest removal of games in its history by exposing Zonitron Productions/Silicon Echo's use of sockpuppet accounts and abuse of Steam store tools that worked against both the consumer and other developers. We brought the case of game swapping on Steam to public attention, in which game developers would release one game and then completely swap the game out for something totally different (a football game being swapped out for a penguin physics game for example) and received legal input on the matters. We have also raised awareness around Steam key revocations and stood up for the customer in these times to try and both get answers from the developers, and distributors and to try and seek a conclusion beneficial to the customer. Our work has also led to us having direct communication lines to Valve, which has greatly benefitted us to be efficient in what we do meaning not only could we report our findings to our community and to the public, but we could also share this information directly with some people high up in Steam/Valve (not Gabe Newell unfortunately...)

We have operated since 2016 self-funded and through our own free time, investing both time & resources into building up our community and maximizing our efforts both in terms of the quality of our reporting but also in it generating results. However as time has gone on, while we have wished to be more ambitious, some of our key team (including myself) are full-time freelancers and struggle to sacrifice the time & job opportunities to dedicate as much time to our operations as we used to. This is why we have now come to Patreon in the hopes that you can assist us in both allowing our operations to continue, but also so that our operations can be increased meaning more time can be spent on these matters and also the range of content can evolve. Some ideas that we hope to bring into the future include podcasts, video versions of our articles, and a website amongst other things. However, as mentioned, these ambitious ventures into the expansion of what we do requires time, funding, and of course people like yourself to support us.

If you want to support high-quality journalism, focusing on stories that don't often get the light shone on them that they should in the mainstream, if you support the rights of both Steam's customers and developers, and making the platform more transparent, open, and better for all, then I do encourage to check out our work and consider becoming a patron today.

We don't do tiers as we truly appreciate any and all of our donors equally, so what we have on offer in our £1 tier is what you get regardless of what you donate. If you do wish to donate more on top, then we do really really appreciate it.