Valve Cracks Down On Steamworks Abusers

Valve put its foot (ban hammer) down and removed nearly a thousand games from Steam today. The company has remained hush hush about the situation, telling PC Gamer only that it "discovered a handful of partners that were abusing some Steamworks tools." It has, however, come out that a considerable number of these nixed games were connected to Russian publisher Dagestan Technology.

Game developer Alexandra Frock pointed out this fun fact on Twitter. She also reminded us Valve has admitted its script that monitors for fake games appears to have a problem verifying publishers from Russia, Georgia, Poland, Kazakhstan, and the Ukraine. What is Dagestan Technology guilty of? Did it make fake games? What is a fake game anyway? 

Fake games exist for the sole purpose of padding achievement scores on Steam. Players can farm achievements with little to no effort using these lazy, poorly made clones of popular games. Dagestan Technology appears to have created a wide array of low budget games with achievement farming in mind. Several titles distributed under other company names may also share a connection to the Russian publisher, another key deduction from Frock. 

A variety of people have spoken out against the ban. One game dev shared their frustration on Reddit, claiming: "Steam sent a letter that the account was banned due to the discovery abuse of the sale of bundles ... but I never abused this." Another indie dev experienced the same problem, posting a screenshot of an email from Steam. "We have detected that your accounts have been used to abuse Steamworks tools for selling bundles to customers," read the notice.

Whether these games have committed actual offenses remains unclear. Steam may have banned the indie developers for a connection to primary target Dagestan Technology or another issue entirely. While you likely won't find any fan favorites on the blacklist, you can peruse the full breakdown here.