Valve deletes almost 200 'fake' games from Steam; new systems for trading cards implemented

A promotional image for Valve Corporation and its games on Steam.Facebook/ValveSoftwareCorporation

Valve Corporation removed almost 200 "fake games" from their online store Steam on Sept. 26. The company coined that term in reference to games with titles whose only goal is to manipulate their software's system to easily trade cards, which consumers are not aware of.

According to WCCFTech, the software giant had enough of studios taking advantage of their system by using "fake games" as a strategy to lure consumers in. They decided to put an end to it, which made game titles like "Clickey" and "SHAPES" no longer visible on Steam.

The company removed a total of 173 games from their platform and their subscribers won't be able to see those from this day forward.

Developers identified these types of games as ones that were made fast and using generic materials coming from Unity, one of the famous game engines out there. Other determining factors for these "fake games" is that they are extremely cheap, which is a good way to deceive consumers.

These games are also often in packages and their only mission is to give out trading cards easily. Having said that, the people behind these "fake games" are responsible for creating bots that can acquire and even sell trading cards without any difficulty.

These made the algorithm of Steam believe that a lot of players wanted to subscribe to those "fake games." Developers who created these games were successful for a time in making Steam's system think that they were real and they were not just there to divert consumers for their trading cards.

This is the not the first time that Valve warned and made some action against these "fake games" creators.

Back in April, the company also made some changes regarding the mechanics of trading cards. They created a new system for recommendations and completely abolished Steam Greenlight. This meant that the new systems worked in restricting passwords of Steam to developers.