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Earlier, Valve pulled 173 "spam" titles from the Steam store. These titles belonged to Silent Echo Studios. The studio avoided paying the $100 fee for Steam Direct on multiple occasions by submitting multiple games at once.This led to multiple games being added to the Steam store to the tune of roughly a couple dozen games per month. These were all submitted with Steam trading cards and thus attracted collectors that just had to catch 'em all. The studio made a pretty penny on the sale of the Steam cards and would pump out even more spam titles to earn even more revenue from the cards. Rinse and repeat.
A statement issued to Polygon by Valve said that they got fed up with what Silent Echo was doing.
Yes, we have a full-time team monitoring reports and they identified an issue that lead to the removal of some titles from a few different Steamworks accounts. These accounts were generating a lot of reports and frustration from customers and other developers. It turns out that the bad actors were all the same person operating under different accounts.
What we found was a set of extreme actions by this person that was negatively impacting the functionality of the store and our tools. For example, 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.
As a result, we have removed those games from the Steam Store and ended our business relationship with them.
The Steam platform is open, but we do ask developers to respect our customers and our policies. Spamming cloned games or manipulating our store tools isn’t something we will tolerate. Our priority is helping players find games they will enjoy playing.
What we found was a set of extreme actions by this person that was negatively impacting the functionality of the store and our tools. For example, 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.
As a result, we have removed those games from the Steam Store and ended our business relationship with them.
The Steam platform is open, but we do ask developers to respect our customers and our policies. Spamming cloned games or manipulating our store tools isn’t something we will tolerate. Our priority is helping players find games they will enjoy playing.
Valve seems to be very inconsistent in how they tackle games like this on Steam. On one hand, it's great that they're getting rid of the spam titles that are put up only to profit from the sale of Steam cards. However, when you see shit like the "Buy 72,000 Achievements" bundle, or the "Buy 62,000 Achievements" bundle, then they need to take a bigger step back and examine just what does and does not belong on Steam.
How exactly is one form of gaming the system less worse than another form of gaming the system when both are working towards maximizing profits with minimal effort from these development studios? Hint: They're both equally trash and both have no place on Steam or any semi-competent platform.
