Valve has updated its Steam policy to reduce players being spammed and phished for information.
With the update, the game portal now imposes limits on player accounts that have yet to spend at least $5 on Steam. Until players have accumulated purchases, they cannot send friend invites, participate in the Steam Market, and will have a limited number of posts on Steam Discussions. Aside from that, users cannot use the browser and mobile chat, open the group chat function, or open the Steam Web API.
Additionally, until the account reaches at least $5 in purchases, the player cannot submit content on the Steam Workshop or post in an item's Steam Workshop Discussions. They are also restricted from voting on Greenlight, Steam reviews, and Workshop items. Their accounts are also adjusted to a quasi-active state, since their account would be locked at Level 0 and would not be able to gain Steam Profile Levels and trading cards.
In introducing this policy, Valve hopes to curb the rising issues about security concerns posed by purchases on Steam.
According to Valve:
Malicious users often operate in the community on accounts which have not spent any money, reducing the individual risk of performing the actions they do. One of the best pieces of information we can compare between regular users and malicious users are their spending habits as typically the accounts being used have no investment in their longevity."
Aside from limiting the features an account can use on Steam, Valve also introduced an added security measure for player accounts. Earlier this week, Steam added a mobile authenticator beta group, where players can test a two-step authentication system in order to add security to their accounts. By enrolling in the group, players can now opt to have at least two stages in account verification. If a user doesn't activate this feature in the Steam account, a new password is generated and sent as a text message every time the user logs in.
