Months after the fact.
I like to keep my audience updated on current events, and usually that means keeping tabs on the games that Valve is banning and those they are not. Earlier this year in the wayward moor that was June of 2020 I discussed a game called…well we’ll call it Dream Girl. I’m not entirely sure if Google is translating that name properly.
Dream Girl was one of those fake games I have talked about before on this “website.” Imagine it not so much as a game but as a roadblock to get into a secret club. It’s like the book that you have to pull to gain access to the speakeasy at the back of the totally legitimate independent bookstore in 1924. For the average person it was just another crappy minesweeper game not available in English. To me? Worthy of investigation. The developer had hidden the Steam workshop from view of non-owners and to me that is a massive red flag.
What I found upon buying this game was that it was a front for movie piracy. Essentially a game with a built in movie player and with the workshop built-in, anyone could upload their “creations” to Valve’s own content delivery servers. That meant bootleg movies, tv shows, and a lot of porn. I mean a lot of porn. A hell of a lot of porn. More porn than you can shake a porn stick at. I’m rambling.
The crazy part of this story is that you’d think Valve would have something in place to notice that a game’s workshop is just chock full of what must have been terabytes upon terabytes of pure .mp4 files, but no. Incidentally I think I might have spooked the developer because our coverage went up on June 23 and they retired the game from sale the following day.
What the developer doesn’t know is that I was secretly keeping an eye on them. The workshop was purged more than once of all of its porn and pirated movies and eventually it just completely shut down. And the game went silent until yesterday when Valve banned it out of the blue.
Why so far out? I don’t know. My guess is that Valve didn’t want to risk the developer putting the workshop back up at some unspecified time in the future for those who managed to buy it while it was on sale. Hopefully they’ve put some protections in place to at least red flag a game whose workshop consists entirely of movie-length video files.
But what do I know, I’m just a guy who manages to track this stuff down in his free time.
MMO Fallout 