A few of the Trading Card-enabled games that likely won’t be affected by Steam’s new update. (credit: Valve)
Following its recently announced updates to Steam store curation and game discovery, Valve announced today that it would be taking steps against “bad actors exploiting the store algorithm for financial gain.” Specifically, Valve says it will start targeting game makers that use phony accounts and the addictive collectability of Steam Trading Cards to try to cash in on content-free titles.
After Steam Trading Cards launched in 2013, Valve says “demand for cards became significant enough that there was an economic opportunity worth taking advantage of.” Once that happened, developers started creating “fake” games with little to no content and forcing them onto Steam by exploiting the Steam Greenlight process.
At that point, the “bad actors” could generate and give away thousands of free codes for their fake game to bot accounts. Those bots would then earn Trading Cards in the fake games and sell them on the Steam Marketplace for an easy profit.
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