A notable video game developer, Alexandra Frock, took to it Twitter and said that Valve has reportedly removed quite a massive chunk of games. The most common link between the 1000 removed games was a Russian publisher, namely, Dagestan Technology. The reports suggest that Dagestan Technology has been active in Steam’s ecosystem under several aliases.
After choosing related apps only for individualistic listings of the games, which are currently banned, have a strange connection. For Instance, Sly Pigs is a few places away from Running Sausage, which is not in Steam anymore. However, Sly Pigs is just two steps away from another notable game, BattleStar Mazay.
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On Monday, one of the users from Steam subreddit was the first person to notice that Valve has assumed the role of whack-a-mole with the banhammer. Furthermore, this led to the removal of thousands of games from the massive PC gaming store. A third-party tracker of Steam Tools did provide with the figure that Valve, in a short time, has removed around 1,000 games from its stores.
Valve released a statement to PC Gamer stating that the games were removed from the store as some partners have been abusing the tools of Steamworks. The company, however, did not specify any of the specific details related to the removal. Soon, Kotaku did reach out to Valve and asked more about the information. However, they are yet to hear back from Valve.
Some publishers aren’t happy with Valve’s decision
By the looks of it, some of the publishers claim that Valve has hit them very badly. However, Valve is firm with its belief that the entire library of games had a single published, i.e., Dagestan Technology.
After further investigation, the cache version of Dagestan Technology’s page, reveals to have only 48 games under its name alongside 4 DLCs. It would be amusing for people to know that Dagestan Technology’s official page doesn’t have any game at the time of writing. Additionally, other publishers & developers who are affected by Valve’s banning claimed that Steam had done a foul play to make the ban happen.
Given that Valve did not provide any specifics concerning several companies along with their offense towards Steam. However, Valve indirectly said that Dagestan Technology wasn’t the only publisher who broke the rules. According to Valve, the removal of 1000 games came into due to the bad behavior of several publishers.
What is the real story?
Something strange is happening across Steam’s ecosystem, which has a direct association with Steam Tools. Some of the games that have been removed from Valve look a little shady; however, other games look quite reasonable, mostly for Steam. In addition to this, some of these games have been on the platform for months and also for years.
The games which Valve did remove doesn’t come into mainstream category, Steam looks like it is in a nutshell. Many developers did reach out to Valve to understand as to why Valve removed their games from Steam. As of now, it is not clear whether the banned games will return to the ecosystem of Steam or not.
