Silicon Echo became a negatively known company, and they finally talked about their situation.
A week ago, Steam pulled 173 games, all of them being low quality, asset flipping titles. Asset flipping is a term that refers to the practice of building a game almost entirely out of pre-made assets with little to no original work, usually sold for ridiculously low prices, such as 49 cents.
One affected company, Silicon Echo, sent a representative to talk to Polygon. The company isn’t happy because of the deletion – in fact, they are now in ruins.
„The only information we have been given is that our games were consistently at the top of user reported titles primarily for practices that are deceptive to the customers. This did not fully explain the reason for the complete account and business termination, so naturally, we sent an email to Valve politely asking some additional questions.” In it, Silicon Echo explained that they are not the same people as Zonitron Productions (another affected company in the crackdown), as Valve thought the two companies are related to each other, although they are separate altogether. However, Zonitron did receive a warning before deletion, while Silicon Echo didn’t.
„We are no heroes; we have indeed sometimes been conducting our business with some practices people may call shady. For example, creating more developer names even though they were on the same account and listed under the same publisher. This was done primarily for easier statistical tracking as we did not believe it to be a problem since all the games were publicly listed under the same publisher and there was no deception included. [The deletion] destroyed everything we have been working for in the past three years.
We are forced to give up game development at this point for more than [sic] one reason. Mainly because our reputation is destroyed beyond repair, but also for financial reasons. We wish we have been warned about this before, in that case, we would focus on a different business plan of development.”
It’s too late. Even the PlayStation 4 receives some… questionable quality games. (Such as Life of Black Tiger.)
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