Quantity over quality is a notion which is not condoned by Valve, as it enacts the takedown of hundreds of numerous games on Steam, ones allegedly made by developers to be sold to hapless players.
Valve pulled out over 200 of the said games from its marketing platform for PC dubbing them as "fake games" that have low review ratings. The said games were apparently made by developer Silicon Echo Studios, which had a whole catalog of these so-called "shovelware" titles on Steam.
Valve was compelled to do the mass purge after several reports from Steam users decried Silicon Echo's games and accused the developers of asset flipping, which is the act of recycling pre-made assets of games into another game to lower the cost of production and then selling them cheap and in bulk on Steam. The said games supposedly offered little value to the buyers and abused Steam's trading card system.
Silicon Echo Studios, however, was not pleased and shared its reply to Valve with Polygon. The developers argued that they only received Valve's takedown notification after their catalog of games had already been removed. Furthermore, Silicon Echo alleged that it was a different company from Zonitron Productions, another company which experienced the shovelware purge. The two were linked after a YouTuber named SidAlpha claimed that Silicon Echo was a front of Zonitron.
Still, Silicon Echo has admitted, "We are no heroes, we have indeed sometimes been conducting our business with some practices people may call shady," the studio said. "For example, creating more developer names even though they were on the same account and listed under the same publisher. This was done primarily for easier statistical tracking as we did not believe it to be a problem since all the games were publicly listed under the same publisher and there was no deception included."
Regardless of Silicon Echo's justifications, the company now has a tarnished reputation that has been damaged beyond repair due to Valve's crackdown on shovelware games. The developers have now distanced themselves from the gaming industry, albeit with bitter resentment toward Valve.
