Twitter Marks Game's Steam Link As Malicious During Critical Event Without Explanation

Steam Next Fest is underway, with hundreds of indie developers offering free demos of their upcoming titles. Sabotage Studio--and its highly anticipated RPG Sea Of Stars--is one of them, but the developer suddenly faces a new obstacle: Twitter has marked links to the game's Steam page as unsafe, and the studio has no idea why.

The official Sea Of Stars Twitter account publicly reached out to Twitter's support team, with the tweet asking, "is there anything you can do about our Steam link being flagged as unsafe? This is seriously hurting the promotion efforts of our game at a critical moment."

In response to an inquiry from GameSpot, Sabotage Studio executive producer and co-owner Philip Barclay called the issue "quite frustrating," particularly due to the timing with Steam Next Fest. "Every download counts during Steam Next Fest, as it is a very competitive event," Barclay said. "We hope this gets resolved quickly."

The studio first noticed the issue on June 19, when a fan commented on a tweet announcing Sea Of Stars's involvement with Steam Next Fest. The flag, according to Barclay, affects both direct links to the Sea Of Stars Steam page and the redirect link from the official website, both of which have been in use for over three years.

"We tried reaching out to support via email on June 19th, but received an automated message and no follow-up," Barclay explained. "Since time is critical--Next Fest ends on June 26th--and we plan on using that link for the launch campaign, we decided to reach out to them publicly with the official Sea of Stars account via Twitter on June 22nd. We didn’t get any answer from them yet."

Sea Of Stars launches August 29 on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC.