Update: Valve confirmed that it removed games published by Silicon Echo, Zonitron and other associated accounts in a statement to Polygon. It follows in full below:
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. 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.
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.
Saw that earlier today and once again seems to be Unity…
Warning Jim Sterling cussing…
Not that I blame Unity. Or using assets or outright selling a kit. Once. But this case was extreme. One team doing business under 10+ different accounts/names and making flips of their flips of their asset kit flips. Released 100 games in just the past few months supposedly.
100 games x $100 Steam Direct fee is $10,000. In a few months. This 3-person team seems to have money to burn. Of course it could just “prove” they were making some good money from those first 73 flips and decided it was time to get serious if they wanted to reach early retirement by Christmas.
Unity has nothing to do with this outside of being a ubiquitous engine. There’s literally no point in bringing Unity into this conversation at all because if Unity didn’t exist, these would all just be done in UE4 and GameMaker instead.
Well it certainly wasn’t meant to offend you. I didn’t see any reason to not mention it once again being a Unity asset. The reason people mention Unity is because it seems to always be centered around using asset kits from the Unity Asset Store. If there was a case where it was an Unreal or Gamemaker Studio or Construct Template then people would say that too I am sure. It is no different than saying once again it was a red car or whatever.
Probably not. I wasn’t going to say anything about this. But since a thread was created figured I would share the video. Not like anyone has to watch it or read if they don’t want to.
