About 200 games developed by Silicon Echo Studios have been scrubbed from Steam. Have you ever heard of them? Probably not. But how is that possible with nearly 200 titles under their belt? Simple: They're asset flippers.
Silicon Echo Studios, who also release games under the name Zonitron Productions, have been taking advantage of Valve's Steam Direct system to cut a profit with games people don't even play. The full explanation of what they do can be found on YouTuber SidAlpha's video below, but a TL;DR will be given.
Titles like Clickey, Grim Banana and SHAPES have been removed. Each game they've published is made with pre-made Unity assets, so the developers can essentially program them on auto-pilot. By publishing multiple games through the Steam Direct program, the studio was able to avoid paying the usual $10 per title fee.
The titles weren't even being bought, so how did SIlicon Echo make money? Steam trading cards. Trading these cards raises user's levels, which can give higher discounts on games. With each trading card traded, the developer gets a small cut. While these cards sell for cents, when you have 200 titles being played by bot accounts to flood the market with cards, your minuscule profit starts to add up.
Valve released a statement to Polygon about the incident:
"Yes, we have a full-time team monitoring reports and they identified an issue that lead to the removal of some titles from a few different Steamworks accounts. These accounts were generating a lot of reports and frustration from customers and other developers. It turns out that the bad actors were all the same person operating under different accounts.
What we found was a set of extreme actions by this person that was negatively impacting the functionality of the store and our tools. 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.
As a result, we have removed those games from the Steam Store and ended our business relationship with them.
The Steam platform is open, but we do ask developers to respect our customers and our policies. Spamming cloned games or manipulating our store tools isn’t something we will tolerate. Our priority is helping players find games they will enjoy playing."
Kudos to Valve for curbing a practice that could ruin legitimate entertainment for those who use it. Have you witnessed any sort of practice like this on Steam?
