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Valve taking further steps to address "fake games"

Valve taking further steps to address "fake games"

More steps are being taken to stop fake games reaching Steam.

In a post in the private Steamworks groups - as spotted by Steam DB (below), Valve said it was further tweaking achievements and trading cards within games.

In May of last year, Valve made changes to how trading cards worked to stop the release of fake games; since then, the firm has seen developers "exploiting" other systems on Steam.

To address this, Valve has implemented new constraints on new games that haven't reached "the same confidence metric". Presumably, this means games that the firm isn't sure are real or not.

These are limited to having 100 achievements and said achievements will not appear on user profiles or contribute to the global achievement account.

Furthermore, these games won't be registered as part of the total number of games a user owns, and they will not be eligible for coupons.

Whether a game has reached a high enough "confidence metric" will be displayed on its store page. Valve doesn't reckon this will have any influence on regular games, but we'll see.

"As you can guess, fake games were inflating achievements and game counts for users to display on their profiles," the firm wrote.

"Our data shows us that an insignificant number of users were taking advantage of this, but the existence of these fakes games still confuses our algorithms and users. For those who still want to buy products for the purpose of increasing their game or achievement counts, we now show whether or not a game is under these constraints on its Store page.

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."


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.