Steam has removed a thousand indie games. Their developers were accused of abusing the API
Valve has started cleaning Steam. Over the past day, the company has removed 982 games from the store’s pages. The official reason is the abuse of Steamworks tools by developers.
It is unclear what kind of violations we are talking about. In a comment for PC Gamer, a Valve representative confirmed the removals and noted that the platform had recently discovered that several partners were improperly using the store API.
There are no popular projects among the blocked ones. These are mostly unknown indie games. The quality of many of them, as far as can be understood from the trailers from YouTube, leaves much to be desired.
The purge began with Bloodbath Kavkaz, released by the Russian publishing house Dagestan Technology back in 2015. Developer Alexandra Frock in the PC Gamer Twitter feed, with reference to the Steam Tools service that tracks deletions in the store, said that in general, a “solid hunk” of blocked programs is associated with companies affiliated with Dagestan Technology.
According to her, people associated with this company under different publishing labels launched games on Steam. And many of these projects are now on Valve’s blacklist.
Theoretically, Steam Tools really allows you to see how games on Steam are related to each other. However, in our opinion, this particular functionality of the service works with errors. For example, it shows that Destiny 2 is linked to 2452 games, including Age of Empires II and Batman: Arkham City.
Therefore, it is not necessary, based on the data of this functionality, to talk about the connection of a large part of the games of remote games with Dagestan Technology. Although, in fairness, we will clarify that by now there are no more games from this publisher on Steam.
Purges have taken place before, but not on such a scale. According to the Steam Tools service, this is an unprecedented event for the site. For comparison, in the last two years before the events described, a total of 1,900 gaming applications were removed.
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