Steam Cleaned: Valve Bans Shady Devs Star Legion and HEG Games


Swinging the hammer down and busting some skulls.

Valve’s banhammer is once again looking to take names and this week it has chosen developers Star Legion as well as HEG Games. Including the demo for Rebons, the total number of apps being banned amounts to 22. As always I don’t have an exact answer on why the games were banned but can supply my own guesses.

Normally when it comes to bans you can narrow down the reason to a few common possibilities. Review manipulation is the chief concern. None of these games met the usual standards so I dug a little deeper and I am prepared to offer my theory.

First off we can throw Dangerous Ground out of the group. Cersgame Studios and Firehawk Studios had their entire library banned between October and December of 2019, the how and why of Dangerous Ground miraculously making it through this ban wave are unknown and of no concern.

What I did notice between Star Legion and HEG Games titles is that they seem to be exploiting something involving the marketplace item system. Rebons for example had 558 buyable items while IQ Test had 169. Both Star Legion and HEG Games were cluttering up their item lists with nothing but color palette swaps of the same image. As for what the exploit is here, I couldn’t tell you. It might be similar to Valve’s crackdown on trading cards being used to launder money.

Who knows. The entire list is below.

  • Drug Lord (Star Legion)
    • DLC: Blue Meth
    • DLC: Black Coca
    • DLC: Hybrid Weed
  • Dharma: The Swan (Star Legion)
  • IQ Test (Star Legion)
  • Quick Maths: addition and subtraction (Star Legion)
  • Contact Draw: Bowling (Star Legion)
  • Contact Draw: Football (Star Legion)
  • Rebons (Star Legion)
    • DLC: Notebook Skin Pack
    • DLC: Pixel Skin Pack
    • DLC: Base Skin Pack
    • DLC: Original Soundtrack
    • Demo
  • Dangerous Ground (Cersgame Studios/Firehawk Studios)
  • Multiple Cars (HEG Games/Endless Games)
  • Spacefight (HEG Games)
  • Quick Runner (HEG Games/Endless Games)
  • Flyingman (HEG Games/Endless Games)
  • Hentai Chaos Run (Thousands of Hentai Games)
  • Flight to Eternity (Bundlegala)