Visual novel Major\Minor just recently had some issues with a DMCA takedown. While that was ultimately resolved and the game is on its way to returning to Steam, it appears that its having a new set of issues, this time involving backgrounds being deleted.

One of the community features of Steam allows game creators to include unlockable backgrounds for people's Steam profile. At Major\Minor's release developer Klace says he included 16 backgrounds with the game, with Steam having no problems with this and Valve giving the game the okay. While it's not clear if something glitched and caused Major\Minor to be allowed to add more or if it was a limitation added to Steam later, at some point Valve put a 10 background limit on games.

Recently Klace has updated some of the badges and card artwork (likely due to the aforementioned DMCA takedown or some of the other issues that have plagued the game) and it seems something broke in the process. Valve would not let him launch his update due to having more than the maximum amount of backgrounds, and six of the backgrounds had to be removed. Not only can one not earn these backgrounds anymore, but they're being removed from people's inventory. Worse: you can technically still buy these backgrounds from Steam's Marketplace but you'll get nothing for spending your money.

Valve seems just as confused as Klace as to how this happened, and are currently investigating this. Klace says they are taking this very seriously and have sent him a short message:

We are still discussing internally how to handle this. The partner site shouldn't have let you create as many backgrounds as you did, so we need to assess how that happened. We likely won't be able to reverse to go back to 16 backgrounds though since that breaks a larger number of things.



We are sorry you're in this situation, and we will do our best to figure out something that works for you, the community and your game.

While we're still waiting to see what happens next, Klace has provided a list of the six backgrounds to avoid buying. I've checked and found several of them are still available to purchase on the Marketplace.

Backstage Chaos! (Shock and Rocker)

Dookster at Large (Rook)

In Service of the King (Velasquez and Save)

Major\Minor (Cast Shot)

Singe's Office (Singe and Inumi)

Tavern Temptation (Trish)

While Major\Minor is the only game currently affected by this, the problem could be Steam-wide. It's unclear how many games could have more than 10 backgrounds, but if any of them try to update similar items then they too will run into this issue.

Quick Take



It seems very strange to me that Valve is aware of the issue, but has left the broken backgrounds up on the market place to be bought. While I'm sure they'll get to it eventually, they should have done it as soon as they knew it was a problem. The ten backgrounds thing also seems strange, and I have to wonder how badly it really could break things if Major\Minor had 16 backgrounds before this. Hopefully we'll be seeing people getting refunds for any bad purchases soon.

