Pixels
Pixels is described as an MMORPG Pixel NFT game that allows players to engage in farming and community-building activities in a pixelated world. It promotes...
What is Shill Detection?
Shilling is when someone promotes a game or token without disclosing that they have a financial incentive to do so — through paid placements, affiliate commissions, or coordinated inauthentic campaigns. We detect it across three independent layers: store review authenticity, social media behavior, and affiliate and sponsored content in video descriptions.
Store Review Authenticity
When an article covers a game available on a store like Steam, we run all available user reviews through an automated analysis that flags inauthentic positive endorsements. Each game’s reviews are examined in a single pass, producing a shill rate (the percentage of reviews flagged) and a one-sentence summary of the overall pattern.
The detector looks for telltale signs of coordinated or paid reviewing:
Generic praise
No specificsBoilerplate enthusiasm that could apply to any game
Copy-paste phrasing
Repeated languageNear-identical wording across multiple reviews
Short 5-star reviews
No gameplay detailMaximum rating with nothing to back it up
Hype without substance
No mechanics discussedPromotional energy with zero description of actual play
Mass-rating patterns
Suspicious clusteringReviews posted in concentrated bursts
The detector is deliberately conservative — it only flags reviews that genuinely look suspect, not merely short or enthusiastic ones. The shill rate and pattern summary are passed to our article writers as context when selecting player quotes.
Social Media Behavior
We score every game’s official Twitter/X and Telegram accounts across three dimensions and classify them with tags. Two of those tags are direct shill indicators:
bot_spam
Fake engagementMostly automated posts, generic crypto hype, or coordinated engagement farming
promotional_only
No substanceOnly retweets, giveaways, and shill content — no development updates or real community interaction
The three scoring dimensions are Activity (how often the account posts), Quality (whether posts contain real information), and Authenticity (whether the account feels organic or manufactured). Scores run from 0 to 100 on each dimension.
Promotional posts alongside genuine development updates are normal and expected — the promotional_only tag is only applied when there is no substantive content at all. Both tags are treated as negative signals in a game’s overall legitimacy assessment, weighted alongside other evidence.
Affiliate & Sponsored Content
When we pull YouTube videos related to a game, we scan each video’s description for signs that the creator had a financial relationship with the product they were covering. We check four categories of affiliate signals:
Affiliate shorteners
Link obfuscationamzn.to, geni.us, bit.ly, and similar services commonly used to hide commission links
Affiliate networks
Commission platformsDomains belonging to Commission Junction, ShareASale, Awin, Impact, Rakuten, and similar networks
Platform parameters
Store-specific trackingAffiliate query parameters for Amazon, Steam, Epic Games, HumbleBundle, GOG, G2A, and others
Referral parameters
Generic trackingCommon referral parameters (ref, aff, affiliate, referral) present on any domain
An affiliate flag does not mean the video’s content is wrong — it means the creator had a financial incentive we think readers deserve to know about. Videos with detected affiliate links have their positive sentiment contribution discounted when we calculate overall community reception.
