Valve issues string of Steam bans after publishers caught abusing Steamworks

Valve has pulled around 1000 games from Steam after publishers were caught abusing Steamworks. A Reddit user highlighted the purge after noticing a recent influx of banned titles on Steam tracker, and after a fair bit of speculation Valve told PCGamer it had pulled a number of games after “a handful of partners were [caught] abusing some Steamworks tools.”

Although no high-profile titles have been affected, some of those banned titles had been on the storefront for a number of years and racked up a fair few user reviews.

Valve didn’t explain exactly how its partners had been misusing Steamworks, although game developer Alexandrea Frock suggested one company — a Russian publisher called Dagestan Technology — had been releasing titles under different names.

Some devs on social media, however, claim they have been caught in the crossfire after being wrongly accused of abusing the system to sell bundles to consumers.

“We have detected that your accounts have been used to assure Steamworks tools for selling bundles to customers,” reads an email posted by indie developer IdalGames on Twitter. “We are removing all associated games from sale and evoking your access to the Steamworks backend. We are not interested in distributing any of your games on Steam in the future.”