Yes, finally "Guilty until proven innocent". A great time to be a smaller steam dev.

@markymint, its not like i am big either, but at least Valve does something now.

without coupons the "trash" should be gone within the next weeks, leaving more for everyone else.

In principle the statement sounds good. In practice it's likely to be wholly positive.

It remains unclear what "the same confidence metric" is. 50k+ games sold? Please disclose this criterion.

There's speculation that it's based on reviews from customers who bought the game outright (not via keys)

Ideally, the moderation of applications. I just do not understand how Valve can skip any garbage. I understand that payment for the slot is first going, but you can return the money if the game is garbage. Steam also practices a refund, why not enter it and pay for the slot?

If this also excludes them from the "Perfect Games" count, as a consumer, this will *absolutely* impact my purchasing patterns - I quite often buy small indie games (less than 15 reviews, definitely don't meet the confidence metric), and if I like them, I'll play them to get 100% achievement completion (usually not so hard on a small indie game) because I really like my "# of perfect games" score (but would never buy a game just for achievements, I have my pride as a gamer). If the store page effectively tells me "you can buy this game, but playing it won't count", I'm gonna pass and move on to the next one. More than once I've been on the edge with buying a little indie game, and a review that says "I managed to 100% this in about 3 hours" pushes me toward buying it, and no longer would with how I understand the proposed changes. Just because I'm not buying fake games to inflate my achievement stats doesn't mean that those stats aren't incredibly important to my Steam experience.

How about get rid of achievements and trading cards all together, and make steam about "playing games only and nothing more"?

@penbit: Says the dev of 3 games with achievements and trading cards
Worst update ever, thanks Valve!

@lylat You're right but please let me say that the publisher really really wanted them, not my decision only...Now that newer games don't come with trading cards by default, I'm happier not doing them.

Also, many gamers from my own community is asking for trading cards. So when the legitimate fans ask for it, we have to do it. But if Valve removes it, I'll be so happy that I won't be "forced" to do it.

Regardless, I'm not adding them in my upcoming game.

Valve you should just hire a person to check if a Game is garbage (cheap asset flipper, achievement spam, game with no real content) and then flag it appropriately. Not counting towards your total games and not allowing Achievements to be shown on the players profile hurts every new released Game that doesnt come from a super famous publisher. Basically that are the 2 main reassons that kept me buying new Games.

(To be honest I would even do that for free.)

It's ridiculous. My game has a good of sales volume and gets many positive reviews. But it lacks of enough community activities. So I can't create Steam cards.

According to the same confidence metric of cards means my game will be considered a fake game in the future. That's terrible! These changes are no good for all small developers. Even if their games not include Steam achievements.

Hello Valve, I can understand why you are taking some steps to eliminate fake games off Steam. I am personally quite happy about that because it will help clean the store page. But at the same time, please think about the small developers who put genuine efforts into their projects which barely sells a few hundred or thousands of copies. I hope that the system does not flag genuine games as "fake". The confidence metrics similar to that of cards might hurt small indie developers such as myself. Thank you!

Could you guys be any more oblivious to the number of aspiring indies you're hurting? Let's recap shall we? Some scummy developers abuse systems you put into place for financial gain, so you, as you do with everything, create an automated system that keeps the established games safe, while not telling anyone what they need to do to to become trusted, regardless of their intentions, then leave it chugging along, when you could EASILY hire people to do the job better and with more efficient results. Then you decide to shove the lesser known games down another peg by removing more features that they could use to market their game and try and get noticed to pass the confidence metric. You're not an indie friendly service if you're only calling games that have ESRB ratings games. If you gave us even a hint of an idea of how to pass the confidence metric that would be something, but no. Valve can't be Valve unless it's more opaque than concrete.

I'm amused at the fact this declaration by Valve is once again being voted up. "We don’t believe these constraints will negatively impact real games in any way, and the removal of fake games should improve the Store experience for everyone." I mean, seriously, up-voters. You're swallowing this? Apparently indie development is not an escape from fanboyism, and indie developers aren't part of Valve's definition of 'everyone'.

I don't think that this way to solve the problem is correct, because in most cases - game without good sales = fake game ¯\(°_o)/¯

And I also don't think that this solution will stop guys like these:
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?publisher=Ghost_RUS%20Games

Moderation is a very good idea and I really appreciate moderating fake games, but punishing everyone won't really help.

P.S.Inventory service is probably a next victim of russian gamedev.