Steam removes hundreds of games after publishers abuse Steamworks Russian publisher Dagestan Technology among those affected, although Valve has yet to offer further explanation

James Batchelor UK Editor Tuesday 26th November 2019 Share this article Share

Valve appears to have had a significant purge of its Steam marketplace, with hundreds of games removed in the last 24 hours.

The removals were first noticed when more than 980 games and soundtracks were added to Steam Tools' list of banned apps. At the time of writing, these were all banned within the last 11 hours, with the most recent removals before that being six days ago.

There appear to be no high-profile titles among them, and many of them have been available for at least three years.

At first, there was speculation about whether this was Valve's efforts to clear the Steam catalogue ahead of the expected (but not confirmed) Autumn sale later this week. However, a company spokesperson gave a different explanation to PC Gamer.

"We recently discovered a handful of partners that were abusing some Steamworks tools," Valve said. "We emailed all the affected partners."

It's not clear what the nature of this abuse is or how many publishers have been affected. GamesIndustry.biz has reached out to Valve for clarification.

One company impacted was Russian publisher Dagestan Technology, according to game developer Alexandra Flock, which appeared to have released dozens of games under several different names. The publisher's Steam Curator page previously listed 48 games and four DLC packs, but is now empty, PC Gamer notes.

Meanwhile, Frock linked to a Reddit discussion where a user claiming to be a Steam developer says their game was removed because of the connection to their previous publisher Siberia Digital, which also seemed to have been affected.