Steam Shovelware Seller Shuts Down, Says Reputation Is "Destroyed Beyond Repair"

Silicon Echo Studios is exiting the video game development following a Steam crackdown that removed over 200 of the company's games.

Regarded as a distributor of "fake games" that supposedly offered little value to buyers, Silicon Echo lost their entire catalog of titles last week. Users frequently accused Silicon Echo of deceptive practices that included making extremely cheap games designed to abuse Steam's trading card system.

Speaking to Polygon via email, Silicon Echo said contested the removal of the games and said that Valve didn't fully detail their reasoning.

"The only information we have been given is that our games were consistently at the top of user reported titles primarily for practices that are deceptive to the customers," Silicon Echo told Polygon. "This did not fully explain the reason for complete account and business termination, so naturally we sent an email to Valve politely asking some additional questions."

The company apparently didn't receive any kind of email or notification that their games were being removed until action was already taken. Other companies besides Silicon Echo such as Zonitron Productions had their games targeted as well, but some watchful gamers have a suspicion that the two companies are actually the same developers operating under different names.

"Silicon Echo is an account completely separated from Zonitron Productions even though it is connected in some ways and while Zonitron Productions got a warning about some developer naming issues, Silicon Echo didn't get a warning of that or any other nature ever," the email from Silicon Echo continued.

The devs went on to criticize the approval process on Steam and questioned how their games could've reached the store if they were supposedly so problematic. But even while sticking up for themselves and questioning Steam's systems, they admitted that they haven't always been on the up-and-up from consumers' eyes.

"We are no heroes, we have indeed sometimes been conducting our business with some practices people may call shady," Silicon Echo said, citing creating multiple dev names under one publisher as an example.

For now, Silicon Echo is removing itself from the field of gaming. They said that everything the company has worked towards in the past 3 years has been destroyed and said that there are multiple reasons for them shutting down.

"Mainly because our reputation is destroyed beyond repair, but also for financial reasons," Silicon Echo said. "We wish we have been warned about this before, in that case we would focus on a different business plan of development."

[via Polygon]