Valve has purged games from their store before, but this is the first time they’ve done it in this magnitude.
Recently, Valve removed 173 games from Steam, all of which are from Silent Echo Studios, that’s become pretty well known for slapping together really cheaply made games out of assets from the Unity game engine.
The studio will then submit multiple games through the new Steam Direct service, leading huge amounts of games being published a month, which is really spammy given the low quality of games they produce. These games, in turn, would feed the Steam trading card market, which Valve’s been fighting a battle against since it took a stance against “fake games” earlier this year, and honestly, Valve is tired of Silent Echo’s antics.
Users don’t always see these games though, due to Steam’s algorithms but the spammy game problem is a serious thing that Steam’s going to need to continually beat down till it addresses the systemic issues that allowed this to happen in the first place.
We don’t know how they’re going to fix this, given that Steam is an “open marketplace” of sorts but they’ve definitely got an uphill battle ahead of them.
