Steam Update: Valve Bans Suspicious $200 Games


Taking out the laundry.

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Steam Scams: Fraudulent Playnite Steam Upload Goes Dark


Good riddance to bad rubbish.

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Steam Cleaned: Valve Hands Sunside Games A Store Ban


Stay in the Light.

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Steam Cleaned: Everyone Hated Supermarket Simulator, So It Got Cancelled


And the horse you rode in on.

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Steam Scams: Open Source Software Listed For $100


Talk about a Dirty Dev™®.

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Steam Cleaned: One Wish Gets Farmed For Cards


Today’s Steam Cleaned topic is One Wish, the latest game to be targeted by card farming bots because Steam allows this sort of thing.

One Wish is by all means a completely forgettable title owing to the simple fact that it came and went without a whole lot of fanfare. The game launched back in June 2018 and probably performed just fine for a low budget game. One Wish also has trading cards, and appears to have been the subject of a mass botting campaign that took place this week.

Despite the fact that One Wish has had two forum threads and less reviews than would fill up a Battlefield server, the game experienced a 24 hour peak of over eight thousand players. Keep in mind this is a game that previously had long periods where nobody was playing at all. Eight thousand concurrent players yet nobody is discussing it in the forums and nobody is leaving reviews. It’s almost as if those accounts don’t have a real person at the helm. Almost.

And 24 hours later, the swarm is gone. Like an antelope devoured by a swarm of piranha, One Wish is back to having 0 concurrent logins.

I wanted to see if One Wish was by its lonesome, so I did a quick look at the other titles listed by developer GD Nomad, and wouldn’t you know it? I found more. GD Nomad also developed My Bones which experienced a similar but nowhere near as large spike in users over the past couple of days. My Bones has a “mostly negative” 25% positive rating on Steam, not exactly the kind of game to jump up 2,500 players for no reason. It averages one or two reviews per month, if even that. It does have trading cards.

Wooden House has trading cards, and wouldn’t you know it. My Bones hasn’t had a single post on its forums in nearly two years and one review since October.

GD Nomad’s library is chock full of games that have sudden inexplicable leaps in popularity only for that popularity to immediately die the following day.

Now none of this is meant to imply misconduct on the developer/publisher’s part, nor is it conclusive evidence that the games are being farmed for cards (although it’s pretty clear). The games could have been swept up by bot farms given that they are 1.) cheap and 2.) have trading cards. That’s all you need. These games are literally a dime in some currencies, and it’s also possible that some keys got dumped off on one of those grey market Russian websites that like to buy these games in bulk from the dev to use in bot farms. Not a bad return for games that most people seemed to hate.

More Steam reports as they appear.

Steam Cleaned: Valve’s Latest Ban Wave Tastes Like Laundering


As has become a nearly weekly occurrence, Valve has instituted another ban wave of Steam games and once again it tastes like money laundering.

I’ve been talking about Steam games being used for money laundering for quite a while now, and it’s obvious that the problem isn’t going to be going away any time soon. Back in January I pointed out that there are a lot of games on Steam sitting at suspiciously expensive prices that appear to be asset flips or ports of mobile games. A week later, I reported that some of the titles had gotten the boot while others were still at large.

Still every so often Valve takes a hammer to some of these suspicious looking games. The image in the header is from the game Push Sticks, and it may surprise you to hear that this game was selling for $30. Well “selling” is a strong word because the game had activity for four days in mid-January and then fell off the charts again. But Push Sticks isn’t exactly an anomaly in my research, since many of the other titles we see get the banhammer fall into the same realm of activity. Ridiculous prices, no activity from the developer, and few if any actual play activity. Also oddly expensive specifically in China.

Someone noted that the first level in Push Sticks appears to be impossible to finish, and the game itself might be totally fake since all we see in promotional screenshots are the first level.

Figuring out how many copies of Push Sticks were bought is next to impossible, and it’s not like Valve is going to tell us. The next title on the chopping block was Wear A Rope which conveniently also launched on January 4, also cost $30, and also looks like baby’s first prototype game.

Am I saying that Push Sticks and Wear A Rope are from the same person/team? Yes. Or run through the same horrible translator. Let’s just look at the product description for Wear A Rope;

“You use a rope and a ring to play. It looks simple, but the operation is very difficult. See how long you can persist. A game that looks very simple, but the difficulty is very large, you can pass you Boring time.”

Compared to:

Push sticks – it’s a puzzle game

Introduction – this is a small game of pushing stakes. It seems to be very simple to you, but it is very difficult to play it

How to play – you just need to push the red stake to the exit to win, you don’t want to see it simple, in fact, it takes a lot of time to complete the research

Features – he will activate your brain. Make your brain smarter, and he can also kill your boring time

Kill your boring time indeed. Which brings us to the third and final game on the list; Co-Jump, Fly. A casual game about sorting trash. What.

“This is a casual game about garbage sorting, it is a platform jumping game, and it becomes more and more difficult over time. You need to sort different types of garbage. If you like the characters in this trash sorting game, please buy our DLC. We made very beautiful clothes for the characters. Of course, please contact us after purchasing our DLC. After providing the information, we will give you the exquisite real thing of this character for free. Thank you for supporting our game!”

Steam’s records show that Co-Jump Fly released on December 11, 2019 for $6.99 USD and had its price jacked up to $79.99 USD on January 13, 2020. What happened on January 13, you might be asking? Well…nothing. Valve removed the low confidence rating just a few days prior. The game has been steadily releasing incredibly expensive DLC; $63.79, $73.99, $53.99, and oddly enough $1.99 for “role” DLC that offers…something. It should be noted that these DLC were also on sale for ninety nine cents and were unanimously jacked up on February 10 to the prices above.

The DLC packs themselves are something quite different, being singular skins but with the added offer of a free physical model if you contact the developer.

“The DLC includes a new player skin, you can choose between the default skin and the new skin, and users who bought this DLC package can also get a beautiful physical model of this skin for free. Please contact us to accept the gift!”

I have never seen this on a Steam game. Co-Jump Fly’s developer name literally translates to “Debris Flow.” Going back to my money laundering theory, Co-Jump Fly may have gone a little overboard and flew too close to the sun. The title gained some attention from Steam users after popping up on the Top Selling list, with people wondering how the hell a game that expensive and with nobody playing managed to become a #5 top seller. Great question, I think you already know the answer.

With Valve’s laissez faire policy on the Steam store, there is no doubt in my mind we’ll be seeing many more of these bans in the coming weeks and months.

Can’t Get On Steam? It’s Not Just You;


Having trouble getting on Steam today? You’re not alone as the service appears to be undergoing a major service outage.

As of 12:30 p.m. on January 30, Valve’s servers are down pretty much universally and globally preventing players from accessing the store or any of its functions, downloading games, and affecting inventories and game coordinators for Valve’s titles. Looking at the charts on Steamstat.us, Valve’s services were suffering from recurring minor issues for several hours before the whole service just tanked.

There has been no public acknowledgement from Valve on the outage which isn’t completely out of the ordinary.

Steam Cleaned: Valve Gives More Shady Devs The Boot


About a week ago I published an editorial talking about the existence of games on Steam that cost a lot of money and don’t exactly justify their price. Titles that look like mobile ports or Unity shovelware that nobody seems to play and not only are being sold for money but a lot of money at that. My hunch at the time was that some of these games may be falling into a less than legal realm, being used as a form of money laundering which certainly wouldn’t be surprising or the first time such a title has shown up on Steam. This isn’t an accusation, just a speculation.

Well it appears I’m not the only one looking into these games as Valve has seen fit to give several of them the boot this week. Let’s dive in.

#1: Lab3D

Lab3D was developed and published by Tantal back in August 2019 and you may need Lasik surgery if you take a look at this screenshot and don’t immediately say “paying $200 is basically robbing the developer, make it $400.” Two hundred smackers, and the developer sounds completely legitimate when responding to a question about the price with:

“No, not trolling. Consider this a kind of experiment, only shhhh. And I can change the base price at any time.”

Lab3D had one review and 51 followers. Was it a money laundering scheme? A troll game? Only the developer knows.

#2: Fantasy Smith VR

Fantasy Smith VR was a $90 product by developer Okamoto 3 Nori, and in addition to the $90 base price it also featured several pieces of DLC all priced out at $40 a pop. Fantasy Smith VR is a little odd because it started out as a $12.99 product before the price suddenly and without explanation hiked up to $89.99 where it sat until Valve banned the game this week. Out of everything on this list, Fantasy Smith VR actually seems like a real game. If you head over to the community hub you’ll find people talking about it playing it and not being happy that the developer hasn’t spoken to anyone.

One of these things is not like the other.

#3: Hunting In Ancient Asia

Hunting in Ancient Asia is another $200 game, this time by Thoth Technology Ltd. everyone’s favorite game developer. Hunting In Ancient Asia had nobody playing it, roughly four instances of one person logged in since it launched in September despite 125 followers. Thoth Technology’s ban could be linked to some questionable reviews that may or may not have been at the behest of the developer. We will never know.

Unlike the other developers on this list, Thoth Technology Ltd. actually had other games on Steam and at more of a reasonable price. In an effort to become the Digital Homicide of virtual reality, Thoth not so much released as it did spam Steam with a bunch of shoddy looking VR titles over the span of the last eleven months, one of which was being sold for $100. I have to assume that the titles sound more elegant in their original Simplified Chinese and were at some level created with education or therapy based clients in mind.

Check em out.

#4: The Ones That Remain

There is a laundry list of games that in my frank opinion warrant Valve’s second look despite the fact that if any of these titles are involved in less than legal operations those activities are probably long over and done with and the cash paid out. These are games that cost $200 (or $100), have zero customers or close to it as far as I can tell, and have no public activity by the developer.

  1. Crisis Action VR; Pixel Wonder
  2. Strike Mole/Physical Ball; Lize
  3. Mouse Run; ATM Game
  4. NUMBER; rongyao0577
  5. LLK; Chenyun0577
  6. Hiscores Gold; Alexander in Uganda
  7. Lgnorant girl doll; wandwand
  8. Adventure Trip; Sunsmaybe Games
  9. Luna and Cynthia; wandwand
  10. Shoot Pump Shoot; Aurora Borealis
  11. Blast Em!; Xiotex Studios Ltd

Early Access Fraudsters: Hellion Is Cancelled, Yet Still For Sale


Hellion needs to be forcibly removed from Steam.

The tale of Hellion is one that should leave you with a fair amount of hesitance to purchase any future product from Zero Gravity (assuming the company doesn’t buckle and cease to exist within the next six months before putting out its next title). Hellion has lots of bugs, Zero Gravity has no intent on fixing those bugs. Rather than push the game through early access and release a finished product, Zero Gravity has decided to abandon the title and cease patching it, ripping off the early access tag and just pushing it out as-is.

Granted, Zero Gravity isn’t done making money off of the game, as they reduced the price to $14.99 and are still selling it. As if to add the fraudulent cherry on the ice cream sundae, Zero Gravity is still advertising Hellion as though the game is still in development. There are features listed on the store page as “work in progress” despite there no longer being any work or progress being put into the title. How’s that for fraud? The company’s own lead production artist and investor even publicly blamed the decision on individuals at Zero Gravity choosing to cut and run to use the funds for their own projects.

The plus side of all of this is that Hellion’s reviews are in the toilet, currently sitting at a 29% mostly negative rating with comments dedicated to warning potential buyers that the game is nowhere near finished and has been abandoned. Should Zero Gravity release a new game, it will no doubt be held to increased scrutiny and the tale of Hellion’s abandonment will surely be reinforced at every possible moment.

For all this and more, check out SidAlpha’s video on the topic.