There’s a lot of games on Steam. But in the last 24 hours, there’s now a lot less after Steam went on a mass purge that saw literally thousands of games pulled from the platform.
The removals were chronicled by the Steam Tools tracker, which monitors games that are restricted, region locked or banned outright. At the current time of writing, the tracker notes that just over 2900 games have been banned from Valve’s distribution platform, but the vast majority of those have been pulled in the last 24 hours, as first spotted on the Steam subreddit.
Initial reports put the number of games pulled in the few hundreds when the purge was first spotted, but media reports since then have put the figure at close to 1000. I’ve emailed Valve for clarification and comment on how many games were pulled, and why, but did not hear back at the time of writing (timezones naturally being a factor).
Update: Post-publication, Valve replied with the following statement:
We recently discovered a handful of partners that were abusing some Steamworks tools. We emailed all the affected partners.
A quick check of some of the titles involved showed that a fair few were the kind of low quality games that most gamers would, rightly or wrongly, associate with asset flips: 2014.Aftermath, a post-apocalytpic shooter with 3 user reviews; Billionaire, a casual management sim about buying and breeding marine life; or Aircraft War X, which could charitably be described as low-poly.
But other actual games appear to have been caught in the mix too. Electric Highways is a game that’s been on Steam since 2015. It’s free-to-play and has exactly 1,337 reviews, and while it doesn’t look like the next LIMBO or Gone Home, plenty of people had fun with it. For all intents and purposes, it’s legitimate — and it’s also been pulled from Steam.
It’s not the only one, with PC Gamer chronicling some others that have also been inexplicably pulled. Developers will undoubtedly be able to appeal the move to Steam, but the better question — and one I’ve put to Valve — is why they were removed in the first place, and what developers can do to stop themselves from being caught in the net.
This isn’t the first time Valve has done a purge, however. Earlier this year a ton of wallpapers and sexually explicit or oriented games were pulled in one go. The latest purge seems along those same lines. It’s not entirely clear what Valve’s criteria was for turfing some games off the platform, particularly those with a base of user reviews and views. But given the company’s history of communication, that’s not out of form.
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