Several hundreds of games got taken off Steam, as this publisher (too) was cheating the system. No, it’s not an AAA company.

After PCGamer published its original article, Alexandra Frock, a game developer, updated us on a situation on Twitter: „A good chunk of them are linked to a single publisher in Russia (I think “Dagestan Technology” is the first name they use) going under a very large number of different names. Here’s a tool that points out dev/pub relationships by support contact info.”

Nearly a thousand games got taken off Steam after abusing Steamworks, but most of the titles can be tied to this Russian company. The games can be tied together via „related apps” – Sly Pigs is two steps away from BattleStar Mazay, or five from Running Sausage. These are banned titles. The curator page of Dagestan Technology is currently empty, but a cached version shows 48 games and 4 DLC.

Valve hasn’t revealed any specifics about the involved companies or the transgressions they have done, but they effectively confirmed that Dagestan is just one of several companies that got a banhammer. „We recently discovered a handful of partners that were abusing some Steamworks tools. We emailed all the affected partners,” a Valve representative told PCGamer.

On Steam Tools, you can see nearly a thousand banned titles on Steam, and while there are several suspicious ones on the list (for being an asset flip, for example), there are also other games that seem to be alright and have been on Steam for months, or even years. (Glasswinged Ascension – on Steam since mid-2017. Mind Trap as well. Electric Highways – over 1300 very positive reviews. And these are just a few of the approximately 982 titles…)

They aren’t mainstream games, but something might be happening Steam. Is Gabe Newell starting to raise the quality bar?

Source: PCGamer

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