Valve Removes 173 Asset-Flipping Games from Storefront

Valve gets a lot of well-deserved flack for not being as “involved” as they really should be with running their storefront. From Greenlight becoming polluted by low-talent hacks to amateur developers literally trying to sue Steam users for posting bad reviews, it’s not exactly the kind of place you’d want to go to buy any low-price indie games - in the past, Valve has been very hands-off, believing that filtering out the good games from the trashy shovelware being dumped into the marketplace was a job for the consumer, but after several prolonged complaints from fans and more well-known personalities, Valve has agreed to step up and finally try to fix Steam’s many, many problems.

Starting with ending Greenlight. Valve has moved on to target individual target users: specifically, Silicon Echo, a one-man studio who published 173 games in the past few years, has officially been removed from the Steam Marketplace, along with all of his crappy, crappy games.

And I do mean crappy. Silicon Echo was renowned for releasing crappy, asset-flipped “games” that existed solely to prop the online trading card market that Valve had created, having been given away for free or in super-cheap bundles. Most of these games, barely playable and relying almost entirely on Unity assets, could be pumped out by the dozens every month, with the past two months seeing the release 86 separate titles.

Which, again, were terrible. Absolutely terrible. And worse, flooding the marketplace for games that might have actually been good.

Valve publicly condemned the practice, and when reached out by Polygon, had this to say about the recent removals:

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.

Well, bravo Steam. That’s one trash-peddler gone, hopefully for good. Now you just need to remove all the others.

Good luck.