Once that metric is met, even earlier players will receive cards for their prior play time.

Instead, Valve is now trying to 'remove the economic incentive that's at the root of the problem.'įrom now on, Trading Card titles will have to 'reach a confidence metric that makes it clear it's actually being bought and played by genuine users' before dropping cards.

Advertisementįurther Reading Valve says goodbye to Steam Greenlight, hello to “Direct” publishingValve has tried to fight these titles by detecting the ways they game the Steam Greenlight voting system to get on Steam in the first place. And even though gamers generally ignore these 'fake games,' their mere existence on the storefront damages the recommendation algorithm that Valve sees as key to Steam's ongoing success, the company says. 'Even if no real players ever see or buy one of these fake games, their developers make money by farming cards,' Valve says. Those bots would then earn Trading Cards in the fake games and sell them on the Steam Marketplace for an easy profit. Further Reading Valve discusses user-centric changes to Steam’s game discovery problemFollowing its recently announced updates to Steam store curation and game discovery, Valve announced today that it would be taking steps against 'bad actors exploiting the store algorithm for financial gain.' Specifically, Valve says it will start targeting game makers that use phony accounts and the addictive collectability of Steam Trading Cards to try to cash in on content-free titles.Īfter Steam Trading Cards launched in 2013, Valve says 'demand for cards became significant enough that there was an economic opportunity worth taking advantage of.' Once that happened, developers started creating 'fake' games with little to no content and forcing them onto Steam by exploiting the Steam Greenlight process.Īt that point, the 'bad actors' could generate and give away thousands of free codes for their fake game to bot accounts.

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