Valve Purges Almost 200 Games From Steam

Valve has cracked down on nearly 200 games in the Steam store, removing them entirely for being low-quality products that only partially exist to be actual games.

The games that were wiped from the store were all titles developed by Silicon Echo Studios, a developer that has caught some flak on Steam in from users for creating some questionable games. Silicon Echo's games have been used to sell trading cards back and forth to net players and developers a quick profit in the past, and their removal is another sign that Valve has had enough of games such as these bloating the Steam store.

A YouTuber by the name of SidAlpha looked into the developers' numerous games that cluttered the Steam store and did some research to see just how many games they were actually creating. He found that they were responsible for close to 10 percent of the games released during the months of July and August, sometimes selling the games under different company names such as Zonitron Productions.

There were 176 games in total that were removed from the store, the majority of them often sold at low costs if not entirely free. They were also frequently wrapped up into cheap bundles to allow players to pick up multiple games at once. With the games, players could increase their user level and accumulate trading cards to resell while buying the bundles at pretty insignificant costs. Buyers wouldn't make a ton of money off of the sale of the trading cards, but it'd almost certainly be able to cover the cost of the games and maybe a bit extra as well.

The latest removals are one part of Valve's stance against games like these. In a statement to Polygon, Valve confirmed their reasoning behind the removal:

"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," Valve said. "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."

Some of the games that were removed include Ball of Paint, Beast Blaster, Point Connect, and plenty of other games. The full list of what's been trashed in the Steam store can be found here.

[via Polygon]