Steam er en åben platform, og ligeså fantastisk det er for de mange kunder, ligeså frustrerende kan det være, når udviklerne bevidst udnytter dette. Heldigvis tager Valve kampen op, og har for nyligt fjernet over 173 spil, der udnytter Steam's Trading Card-system:
These fake developers take advantage of a feature we provide to all developers on Steam, which is the ability to generate Steam keys for their games. They generate many thousands of these keys and hand them out to bots running Steam accounts, which then idle away in their games to collect Trading Cards. Even if no real players ever see or buy one of these fake games, their developers make money by farming cards."
I sidste måned gjorde Valve det desuden klart, at de ikke længere masseproducerer nøgler til Steam-spil, da de ikke ønsker samme udnyttelse af systemet igen. PCGamer har haft fat i Valve, hvor de har fået det svar, at det formentligt er én person der står bag de 173 spil. Derefter har han haft en masse falske kontoer, der gennem bots har spillet for at opnå trading cards, der derefter er blevet solgt på auktionshuset for at få rigtige penge:
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.
Vi er ihvertfald glade for at Valve rydder op i deres butik.