Valve Removes 173 Games From Steam Due to Abuse of Steam Direct Protocols
Valve recently removed up to 173 titles from its popular platform for PC games, Steam, after confirming that several accounts were found "abusing" their Steam Direct support services.
The games involved were scrutinized for having extremely low performance and yet gained overwhelming feedback. Moreover, the accounts listing these games for sale on Steam were found manipulating Steam Direct applications and were allegedly involved in trading card activities.
Valve confirmed the news to Polygon and said they had previously put up a team that monitored the activity of the said games and their developers. Their efforts led them to identify and remove 173 titles manufactured by "a few different Steamworks accounts."
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Several games such as "Grim Banana," "SHAPES" and "Clickey" were deleted from Steam, as well as the entire list of titles put up by Silicon Echo and Zonitron.
Following their investigation, Valve confirmed: "It turns out that the bad actors were all the same person operating under different accounts."
"This person was mass-shipping nearly-identical products on Steam that were impacting the store's functionality and making it harder for players interested in finding fun games to play. This developer was also abusing Steam keys and misrepresenting themselves on the Steam store," Valve further explained.
Reports add that the games involved in the crackdown were made with readily available materials on the Unity engine. With that, these game makers were able to list multiple titles at a very fast rate and under a single Steam Direct application for free or cheap keys, thus avoiding paying the $100 fee per title regardless of how their products performed based on sales and customers' reviews.
A few weeks ago, gaming commentator and YouTuber SidAlpha conducted his own investigation and was able to release a list of 119 games – 86 of them were suspiciously released in a very short window of two months.
For example, SidAlpha discovered that Silicon Echo Studios was able to develop and publish 12 games for 2017 with most of those titles listed just in July to September. Meanwhile, Zonitron Studios put up 16 games in the July to August 2017 period.
In August, Valve recognized this malpractice of using Steam Direct applications and requests for free or cheaper Steam keys. The company announced at the time that they would implement stricter rules to stop abusive developers.
While the company maintained that Steam is a platform for developers and gamers, Valve reiterated in its recent statement: "Spamming cloned games or manipulating our store tools isn't something we will tolerate."
