Valve has taken a significant step to crack down on what it terms "spam" games by a very particular developer. Silent Echo Falls was a company with a total of 173 games on Steam and they've all now been removed in one fell swoop.
The tactics employed by Silent Echo Falls aren't unique, but it was certainly one of the worst offenders. It typically published tends of games a month. They're cheaply made, far from fun and often confusing as why anyone put money down on them. The thing is, they don't need to, as the whole purpose of them is to promote trading card sales. Because of the real money marketplace that surrounds trading cards, any game can be worth a few dollars when played, which means bots and those with lots of time on their hands can make money playing them.
Which in turn means Silent Echo Falls can make money on them.
Although Valve isn't a fan of such tactics, it rarely decimates huge numbers of games, but in this instance it's clearly had enough with what Silent Echo Falls is up to. In one move it swept 173 games from Steam, decimating the 'developer's' library.
"This person was mass-shipping nearly-identical products on Steam that were impacting the store’s functionality and making it harder for players interested in finding fun games to play," said Valve (via Polygon). "This developer was also abusing Steam keys and misrepresenting themselves on the Steam store. As a result, we have removed those games from the Steam Store and ended our business relationship with them."
