Steam Cleaned: Unraveling Remaining Threads of Dagestan Tech


The Russian symbiote of gaming.

Before I begin, I’d like to make a couple of notes that need to be completely clear. The Steam Cleaned section has contained a fair share of accusations/suspicions of criminal behavior. To the best of our knowledge, there is no proof that Dagestan Tech was involved in any criminal activity, nor should anything in this piece imply such. Dagestan was banned from Steam and despite Valve’s best efforts, they haven’t remained off the platform.

Secondly I should note that ultimately these findings are speculation. Essentially we have all of the indicators of association without an actual business ledger saying Dagestan and these publishers are the same entity. The links are too close to be coincidence in our opinion.

Let’s go forward.

Why Was Dagestan Dages-banned?

Dagestan Technology was caught up in a massive ban wave on November 25-26, 2019 and the reason for the ban hasn’t quite been understood or communicated well by the mainstream media. The focal point of the ban wave appeared to have been developers manipulating bundles and store tools, with the possibility of review manipulation on the side. Hundreds upon hundreds of games were wiped from the service, with Dagestan being a major player in the ban wave.

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The biggest mirage around this mass ban was how much Dagestan was involved. Not only did Dagestan Tech get banned from Steam, but we’ve been slowly uncovering a list of sock puppet accounts and fake publishers that clearly appear to be Dagestan spinoffs. The two biggest names are AYE Technology and Enjoy Games which I want to talk about today.

1. Someone/thing Spooked Dagestan

If you accept the suggestion that Dagestan/AYE/Enjoy Games are all the singular entity that the evidence points them out to be, it makes sense that the company and its sock puppets would be working pretty much in tandem with one another. Through sheer dumb luck, we happened to notice a trend while diving through SteamDB’s history page that shows Dagestan may have been aware of the upcoming ban if not at least suspicious enough to take action.

SteamDB logs everything that a steam app does and keeps its history in a neat sequence of events. Everything; name changes, new packages, updates, everything. It is how for example we can see a RuneScape client being listed despite no store/community page existing. While trawling through some of the banned games that had been hit in the November 25 wave, we came upon an interesting find:

It looks like some of the titles tried to jump ship, or at least remove associations with Dagestan.

Valve’s ban wave hit on November 25, but on October 12-17 Dagestan’s developers were working overtime to rid their games of the association. We have uncovered titles by the dozens with presumably many more yet to be uncovered that had unceremoniously stripped themselves of the Dagestan/AYE Tech/Enjoy Games publisher brand during the same week. Too many to be a coincidence.

Why these games stripped off their publisher titles is the mystery. Were they tipped off? Did someone at Valve start asking too many questions? Is it completely innocuous? For so many titles to perform the same action within a few days, I have my sincere doubts that it was a coincidence. It didn’t work, since pretty much all of the titles got banned. Still, they tried.

2. How Did This Get Sparked?

The title that brought all of this to a head was Coronavirus Simulator. Yes, that game. Coronavirus Simulator is a stupid looking meme game that I talked about back in January. To me it looked like a troll game from a group I dubbed the Internet Memesters Union. Created by obviously fake developers Uzbekistani Bears and Putin Team. While I didn’t think much about the game, it caught the attention of my associates for two reasons: Putin Team, and the trading cards.

If you click on Putin Team on the store’s publisher list, you get nothing. Checking with SteamDB however shows that Putin Team is also the developer of Putinization. Coronavirus Simulator was banned off of Steam on March 2 while Putinization is still on the store as of this writing. Coronavirus Simulator also had a page advertising trading cards and how players could help get them in the game. The post had a contact email for “danila.fox.studio@gmail.com.” This is important.

If you Google that email, you find another Steam page that uses the same address: Crazy Simulator. Crazy Simulator is developed by Danila & German, published by Intim ne predlagat’, and has not been released. Crazy Simulator has an ad for Furry Stories which has the same exact wording as appears on Vladimir Putin Style, Omon Simulator, and OMON: Bottle Royal. These games list fake developer/publisher names for the most part, but Bottle Royal and Vladimir Putin Style are both developed by KGBHardBassInc., with the latter only acknowledging the developer via Gamejolt.

3. Lots Of Fake Putin Games

I think the readers of this website know better than anyone that Steam is full of trash, but I’ve come to pretty much assume right off the bat that any game with Putin in its name is fake and probably from the same group of asset flippers and troll/meme game makers trying to farm trading cards. So I started looking for games with Putin in the name and I found a lot of garbage.

We already know that these devs are using sleazy tactics to keep their games from getting associated with one another. Unfortunately these devs really like to take credit for their work, which is how I came upon the name Andrew Larionov. Andrew Larionov runs Versus Publishing/Versus Studio. His Steam profile is blank, but we can look at his forum posts to see that he serves as a developer role on a numerous games, some of which are banned and some that are not.

Larionov leads us to our second figure of interest:

4. Karnavalny

The Danila Fox email opened up a whole mess of fake developer/publisher names but what really sealed this together were two names that appear all over Steam in not-so-hidden ways. Karnavalny and Andrew Larionov are posting as developers for tons of games that all have different developer/publisher credits on their Steam pages. Some are banned, some have not been. Pretty much all of them are shady.

We found Karnavalny associated with:

  • Crazy Simulator (Unreleased)
  • Coronavirus Simulator (Banned)
  • Putinization
  • OMON Girl: Bottle Royal
  • OMON Simulator
  • Vladimir Putin Style (Banned)
  • Furry Girls Style (Banned)

I’m not sure if Karnavalny is basically the face of the publisher, but it would assume that he is managing a wide variety of shell publisher names because many of these games do not share the same publisher let alone developer. Andrew Larionov similarly had a wide variety of developer/publisher names under his managerial belt.

5. The Proof Is In The Bundles

So if we want to stick the pin in Dagestan’s connection to AYE Technology and Enjoy Games, outside of the fact that all three were banned in the same wave, that developers using Dagestan were regularly using AYE and Enjoy Games, that the trio were equally stripping their publisher names off of titles during the same week of October one month prior to the mass ban, or that only one developer we are aware of had actually been unbanned after the November 25 ban wave, we can look at Dagestan’s bundles.

Dagestan loved bundles,

  • Dagestan Bundle #1 contains a dozen games, of which four were listed as Dagestan Technology on the game’s Steam page. Seven games listed AYE Technology, and four were listed as Enjoy Games. But that doesn’t add up to twelve! True, one game shifted from AYE Tech to Dagestan. Every single game with AYE Tech removed its publisher on October 12, and every game with Enjoy Games removed it on October 15.
  • Dagestan Bundle #2: All of these games listed used Dagestan’s name.
  • Dagestan Bundle #3: All of the games but two listed Dagestan, but every game with Dagestan attempted to pull the name as a publisher from their Steam store on October 15-16.

It doesn’t make sense that Dagestan would be featuring games from other publishers on their named bundles, especially not an entire bundle made almost completely out of games not published by Dagestan.

6. Our Conclusion (For Now)

This is not a comprehensive report on Dagestan links, and there will definitely be more coverage coming in the future. Dagestan Technology is not dead, and I believe they have agents working under a plethora of shell accounts that still exist on Steam and are being added every now and then. The connection through many of these games appears to be lazy copy-pasting of news items, the connection of users like Karnavalny and Andrew Larionov, and linked email addresses.

Will Valve do anything about these games? I’d like to believe they would, but history has proven me wrong. That being said, a number of games have been banned in the time it’s taken to write this piece, so you can never really know. Maybe Valve will surprise us all.

One thing I did learn is that these shell accounts are having a much harder time getting access to what they want: Trading cards. Having trading cards on their games is the end goal as they can generate keys and just set up bot farms to generate thousands of dollars worth of trading cards to turn into gems and sell on the Steam market. Many of not all of these games more recently have either been banned or never fell out of Valve’s low confidence metric to actually qualify for trading cards. Hence the post asking for community help that led to the email connection, and all of this.

7. Big Thanks

This piece was a collaborative project including Sentinels of the Store, Sanji Himura, and Lord Croqosquirrel.