Steam just removed 170+ "card-farming" games

Games
1

Full list of titles deleted here.

Although there’s no official statement from Valve or the impacted developers yet, this is likely related to this May announcement.

These fake developers take advantage of a feature we provide to all developers on Steam, which is the ability to generate Steam keys for their games. They generate many thousands of these keys and hand them out to bots running Steam accounts, which then idle away in their games to collect Trading Cards. Even if no real players ever see or buy one of these fake games, their developers make money by farming cards.

2

The list you linked isn’t correct, or at least isn’t 100% correct. Camera Obscura, at least, is a real game and is still available on the Steam store.

3

Yeah, it’s not everything in that list, but it does contain the ones that got zapped.

“Color Snooker” for example, now just shows “UNINITIALIZED” in Steam’s store.

4

These guys sure had a lot of asset flips. I didn’t know it was that bad.

5

So… there’s a group called sentinels of the store trying to block shitty games from showing up?

What a world. Still, seems necessary.

6

Good fucking riddance!

Those guys had thrown their games into my library without me being able to say a word about it. Library spam, that was something new. I was pissed that Steam allows that sort of behavior, and the extreme of their answer is strangely quite pleasing to me.

7

LOL - Rage Parking Simulator? How does that work? Do you park across two spaces and try to “earn” keyings? Or do you park next to the double-parked car as close as you can without touching it?

8

I believe it would be best not to link the list at all if it is not accurate and wrongly includes games that are innocent of “card-farming.”