Steam Game Pulled from Store For Secretly Mining Cryptocurrency

There are a lot of crappy games on Steam, as many reports have been quick to point out, and typically we’re able to shrug them off as cheap and lazy asset-flips with no real value beyond trophies and other stupid collectables that people value for whatever reason. They were always super exploitative, but one such game, Abstractism, decided to take things one step forward, and has thus been banned from Steam in the process.

Abstractism was a pretty nondescript puzzle-platformer with simple but serviceable graphics and gameplay. But what people soon noticed was that SidAlpha articulated in the below video was that the game had a peculiar system where it would reward players with rare loot about seven times a week. The catch? The loot would become more valuable the longer you kept the game running.



Now, there’s pretty much no reason to keep a game running on your computer for long periods of time, especially if you’re not playing it. So what people figured – reasonably – was that the real purpose of Abstractism was never to be a puzzle-platformer, but rather, to silently mine Cryptocurrency in the background while people played and kept it open and running.

There was no definitive proof or confession that was the case, but the argument was strong enough for Valve to remove the game and ban the developer.

All the same, it’s worth mentioning that technically Abstractism wasn’t against Steam guidelines, as it was neither illegal, nor was it trolling: after all, mining bitcoin is legal most places and it was arguably a more functional game than a lot of the crap you find on the Steam store. So while Abstractism was removed from Steam, it’s little question that similar games are going to start cropping up, following its example. Games that might have an easier time getting away with it.

It’s gonna be rough from here on out, I suspect.