I was hoping to get around to this much sooner as it just means I've gotten a large backlog to get covered, but I'm hoping to touch base on the recent activity coming out of Valve.

Since the last post I made talking about a developer being banned, Valve have definitely been busy little bees as they have banned a total of 28 games in the last 2 weeks. These weren't coming from one developer, however we don't have the full picture as to what's going on with some of these bans in question.

There has been a few seperate "waves" I guess you can call it, but the first ban wave that came was on May 12th where Valve banned 13 games coming from 6 different developers, these developers being the following:

• Wind
  
• Funny
  
• FunAlter Games
  
• Galuc Games
  
• Pink game studio
  
• CHG Games

The games that were banned were as follows:

• Happy Together
  
• CupGuess
  
• Press Forward OOOOONNNNN
  
• Dream Gallery
  
• Takeout food
  
• Miniz Adventure
  
• Pink Girl
  
• My Grandfather's Farm
  
• Crazy Oce
  
• Kumpels
  
• The King's New Castle
  
• Bacillus
  
• Oil Mogul

The most interesting one, to me, was the ban of Miniz Adventure. As some of you may know, this game was the topic of the last post we made because we showed evidence that the game was partaking in review manipulation. I posted a tweet tagging some Valve employees hoping to get some attention on the matter and I did get an interesting response from Alden Kroll which sheds possibly some light on the reasonings towards why the games and the developers were potentially banned:

Originally posted by Alden Kroll:

It sometimes takes us a couple of days to take action, but rest assured that we are looking into it. Sometimes when you pull on a thread, more of the sweater unravels than you had expected

To me, this potentially highlights that these games/developers may have also taken part in review manipulation and/or these developers were the same developer under other accounts, seeing as how they were banned in the same wave. Alden's inference as to how "more of the sweater was unravelling" indicating they found either other accounts doing the same practice or more accounts associated with this developer. However, this is just speculation on my part, but it's backed up with some evidence and logical thought, more than I can say for people just screaming that games are banned because they think Valve are censoring overlords[www.oneangrygamer.net].

We can say almost for definite though, that Miniz Adventure and its developer Galuc Games were banned for review manipulation. The others, we can speculate similar reasoning seeing as how they were banned at the same time and what Alden has stated, but we don't know for certain.

The bans didn't stop there though, 2 days later, May 14th, another ban followed.


This one was just for 1 developer though, this developer being a name that was recognised by a few of us, that developer being "Streamworks" resulting in another 15 games being banned.

Streamworks has a reputation on Steam for basically not playing by the rules in terms of copyright and stealing assets and art where and when they can. Streamworks were known for a lot of the cheap shovelware hentai puzzle games with stolen art if any of you remember those. As MMOFallout[mmofallout.com] pointed out in their coverage there was a lot that Streamworks and their games could be criticised for, some of their games for example just reportedly didn't work when you bought them, their games at times labelled as having achievements when they didn't, effectively partaking in false advertising. And also, like I said, they were known for stealing lots and lots of artwork repeatedly across their library of games, which can be exemplified in their games Ecchi Girls, Cyberprank Girls 2077 and Destiny Girls. This developer made games on the cheap so much so that they just flat out stole great portions of what make up their games.

There's a lot to speculate about Streamworks and there's a multitude of reasons as to why they should have been banned a long time ago. I feel it's good Valve did clamp down on them, but it definitely could have been done sooner, these guys have been heavily documented on what they do. What was the actual reason? We don't really know, no statement was given by Streamworks or Valve, so really we can just guess at this point unfortunately.


Lastly, just yesterday, May 23rd, another game and developer got banned. The game in question was Kepler[steamdb.info] and "developed" by...."Myself".[steamdb.info] The sheer laziness on these guys where not only was Kepler an asset flip of the now removed asset kit "Super Platformer 2D" (I only know it's that kit because Zonitron Productions/Silicon Echo used it for their "Sleengster" games back when they spammed over 170 games to Steam across 15 different accounts) but they can't even be assed to create new names. The sheer amount of brain capacity required to craft a new name up must have just been beyond this developer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ6Jrn7COAk

Kepler, or as it will be referred to as hereafter "Super Platformer 2D", was priced[steamdb.info] at a whopping $200 which has been the main point I've seen of suspicion as to why this game got banned. People believe it's being used for a form of money laundering. Do I think that's the case? I mean, I haven't found anything else that would be warrentive of a ban or what Valve may look at as being a real reason for severing business ties with the developer, however I haven't really seen any other game banned for this reason and there are games on Steam that are priced similarly, are asset flips, have gotten a lot more attention than Super Platformer 2D and are still up on the Steam store.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1255220/Super_Fight/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRpwfxCgeOE

So, do I think it's the reason? Probably not, I wouldn't rule it out but I just don't personally fully buy it. I have messaged Valve and asked if I can get a statement on this, I wouldn't hold my breath though as they are pretty tight lipped these days when it comes to matters like this, but if I hear back, I will throw the reason in, it would be interesting to know.

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