The Christmas period is a good time to give your house a bit of a deep clean in lieu of decorations and having guests over. Valve appears to be taking this sentiment to heart this year, as it’s begun a clear-out of Steam’s archives.

Spotted by Reddit user thomasthe1st, according to the banned list on madjoki.com’s Steam tracker, Valve is in the midst of a huge dumping of games and projects that are clogging up the storefront’s digital shelf-space. Starting with Bloodbath Kavkaz, hundreds and hundreds of games have been banned from the service, more coming almost every second. As spotted by developer Alexandra Frock on Twitter, in replies to PCGamer’s report on the story, many of the entries link back to Dagestan Technology, a Russian publisher using a number of different company titles on the store.

The guts of 1000 games made the list over the course of several hours. Before this purge, there was a steady drip of deletions, as evidenced by going back through madjoki’s records. Most happened in small clumps, sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly, but nothing anywhere near this scale. In a response sent to PCGamer, Valve wouldn’t go into specifics, but a representative did say that more than one “partner” was involved in the bannings. “We recently discovered a handful of partners that were abusing some Steamworks tools,” the statement reads. “We emailed all the affected partners.”

This isn’t the only piece of surprising behaviour from Valve. After years of silence on the Half-Life series, the studio revealed a new game in the iconic series. Coming out March 2020, Half-Life: Alyx is a VR project set in-between the first and second Half-Life. Though it’s not the fabled Half-Life 3, to see any new Half-Life at all after 12 years is still something.

Related: Here are the best free Steam games

Talking Steam specifically, Destiny 2 shot to the top of the charts in its first month on the platform, dominating the charts for October. After eight years apart, EA returned to Steam with EA Access, its own subscription service on the Steam store, of which Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was the first release.

If nothing else, looks like Steam’s getting the place tidy for the Black Friday sale, which starts November 26.