Valve removed 173 games from the Steam store this week, all of which are connected to Silent Echo Studio, a company that has been known to release a host of off-the-cuff games.
Silent Echo Studios is known to churn out games quickly by slapping together assets from a popular game engine called Unity. This enables the company to release a lot of games in quick succession. In July and August alone, the company was responsible for 10 percent of all the games released in Steam, accounting for 86 titles released during the said months.
Steam said that it has a full-time team monitoring reports from customers, and has identified an issue that led to the removal of the titles. The company in question was also found to be operating under different names, including Silicon Echo, Zonitron, among others.
"What we found was a set of extreme actions by this person that was negatively impacting the functionality of the store and our tools," Steam said in a statement to Polygon. "For example, this person was mass-shipping nearly-identical products on Steam that were impacting the store's functionality and making it harder for players interested in finding fun games to play. This developer was also abusing Steam keys and misrepresenting themselves on the Steam store."
The removed games include titles like "Rage Parking Simulator 2017," "Fruit Candypop," and all versions of "SHAPES."
Publishing these kinds of games would feed Steam's trading card market, wherein users can earn trading cards by getting the cheap game bundles. Racking up a number of trading cards can help users pay for purchasing games.
The publisher also typically generated a large number of steam keys for its games, and handed them over to bots running steam accounts. The bots will then be spending time in the games and will earn Trading Cards in return.
Steam has condemned this practice in recent months, and even released an update to the trading card feature to prevent abuses. "We're not interested in supporting trading card farming or bot networks at the expense of being able to provide value and service for players," Steam told Polygon in August.
