Gaben's naughty list - Over a thousand indie games removed from steam

[williamcll]

Steam has started banning many games ahead of the black Friday sale likely due to them breaking Steam's ToS (such as abusing steamworks and review manipulation), most of which are unpopular small indie games.

Quote

The Christmas period is a good time to give your house a bit of a deep clean in lieu of decorations and having guests over. Valve appears to be taking this sentiment to heart this year, as it’s begun a clear-out of Steam’s archives.

 

Spotted by Reddit user thomasthe1st, according to the banned list on madjoki.com’s Steam tracker, Valve is in the midst of a huge dumping of games and projects that are clogging up the storefront’s digital shelf-space. Starting with Bloodbath Kavkaz, hundreds and hundreds of games have been banned from the service, more coming almost every second. The additions are almost uniformly cheap indie projects, many of which are hard to find information on beyond their now deleted Steam pages. At time of writing the overall amount deleted is at just over 2550, having jumped up several hundred within the last two hours.Before this purge, there was a steady drip of deletions, as evidenced by going back through madjoki’s records. Most happened in small clumps, sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly, but nothing anywhere near this scale. There’s been pressure on Valve for years to increase moderation on Steam, to have more stringent guidelines for what’s acceptable on the service and what isn’t, from bigoted content to asset flips and so on. This certainly looks like it might be a step in that direction.

 

Source:https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam/deleted-games
https://www.pcinvasion.com/hundreds-of-games-are-being-removed-from-steam-these-past-few-hours/

 

Thoughts: Considering how obscure most of these games are, I doubt anyone will mourn or complain about the remove. It is fascinating how much you can do in video games to earn money without following usual practices.

[Hugh54321]

5 minutes ago, williamcll said:

bigoted content

are they banning postal?

[vanished]

I'm sure if they scooped up anything "important" in all of this someone will notice and we'll hear about it soon enough.  Until then, I'm content to assume they know what they're doing and have not gotten rid of anything anyone would miss.

[vanished]

32 minutes ago, VegetableStu said:

okay I'm not sure what's Colonel Mortis's stance on paste dumps on this forum, but I've got the 982-row (as of writing, may be more may be less depending on valve) text list sorted by name o_o

 

if anything, it's an interesting exercise on naming your first game or story or movie or short or etc o_o there are things like

• noun
• Name Rehashes (H1Z1, Battle Royale, Global/Offensive, etc)
• story titles (like how one would find a name to title a book) (don't get me wrong, those are really interesting)

and some others

 

EDIT: also i gotta find out how to sort images by name ,_,

Just put it in a spoiler, maybe broken down by additional spoilers for each letter and no one would be mad

[Murasaki]

Lol glad they're weeding the garden. I like how I saw "Where's Santa" on the list. 

[Arika]

about time. Wish Google Play did this....just ever

[mr moose]

What happens when they delete a game? does it just disappear from the store and remain active in customers libraries (able to be played and re downloaded), does it just disappear altogether or doe they refund the purchase and delete it?

[RuffRuffmcgruff]

8 minutes ago, mr moose said:

What happens when they delete a game? does it just disappear from the store and remain active in customers libraries (able to be played and re downloaded), does it just disappear altogether or doe they refund the purchase and delete it?

Steam and Refunding? But seriously though I reckon they'd just leave them in people's libraries and remove from the store.

[ravenshrike]

Leviathan wakes. Between this and HL:Alyx it's pretty clear that Valve has finally started moving again. Hopefully it stays that way.

[Thaldor]

6 hours ago, mr moose said:

What happens when they delete a game? does it just disappear from the store and remain active in customers libraries (able to be played and re downloaded), does it just disappear altogether or doe they refund the purchase and delete it?

They just disappear from the store and remain in the libraries of those who have bought them. So no one is loosing their asset flips, rip-offs or achievement/MT miners (even if they would love to), new people just can't buy them (which probably in most cases is good).

[JZStudios]

Steam has done this before, which ironically I think usually ends in some kind of backlash of people complaining about "censorship" but there's way more than 2500 turds on Steam. At least GOG and Epic handpick whats actually going on sale.

 

As for me, any amount of cleanup of any kind is a good thing. Now if only they'd make tags useful and won't block irrelevant things because I ignore Hentai and someone or something marked something not hentai as such. Or at least have a way to strip out literal sex games from things like The Witcher which has sex scenes.

[ESPImperium]

Not gonna lie, this is probably a good thing. I think Valve is under pressure to clean up its store and store front for a while. Taking questionable games from a moral point of view and also questionable studios from questionable states as well. I can see Valve try to establish an almost Apple App Store approach for Indy developers having their games and apps to be checked before they are published, as we don't know what code they are installing into our machines.

 

Despite the backlash that will happen where the fans of Indy games will hate it, I think on balance, it will show that Valve are looking to clean the platform up. Also the cynical part of me thinks it's them freeing up server space as more games are 50+ GB in size, even up to the ~ 100GB range, but ill leave that point to be debated.

[JZStudios]

2 hours ago, ESPImperium said:

Not gonna lie, this is probably a good thing. I think Valve is under pressure to clean up its store and store front for a while. Taking questionable games from a moral point of view and also questionable studios from questionable states as well. I can see Valve try to establish an almost Apple App Store approach for Indy developers having their games and apps to be checked before they are published, as we don't know what code they are installing into our machines.

 

Despite the backlash that will happen where the fans of Indy games will hate it, I think on balance, it will show that Valve are looking to clean the platform up. Also the cynical part of me thinks it's them freeing up server space as more games are 50+ GB in size, even up to the ~ 100GB range, but ill leave that point to be debated.

The server thing doesn't really hold. The total size of 2500 asset flips can't be that large when full scale games of last gen are 7-15gb. And storage is relatively cheap and getting cheaper.

[PSUGuru]

On 11/26/2019 at 2:43 AM, RuffRuffmcgruff said:

Steam and Refunding? But seriously though I reckon they'd just leave them in people's libraries and remove from the store.

It stays in your library.

I bought the game RUSE on steam years ago, then they removed it. It's still in my library and playable.

[TechyBen]

33 minutes ago, JZStudios said:

The server thing doesn't really hold. The total size of 2500 asset flips can't be that large when full scale games of last gen are 7-15gb. And storage is relatively cheap and getting cheaper.

Overheads. It's not the storage space. It's managing the catalogue of that size.

[kittykat-dev]

Good, they should remove more.

 

Making a game is trivial nowadays, and the amount of effort of game creation is slowly decaying over time.

 

Open up an Engine, follow a 10 minute tutorial online = I'm a game developer now!

 

This is akin to someone claiming to be a police officer because they did a ride-along.