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Valve kills Steam game for secretly mining for cryptocurrency

Okalo Union appeared to be taking advantage of more than people's time.

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Valve has just killed another game on Steam. This time the company erased a product called Abstractism from its store - and for good reason it would seem. The indie platformer from developer/publisher Okalo Union (which has been thrown off Steam as well) looks very plain and rather straightforward at first glance. However, YouTuber and Team Fortress 2 fan SidAlpha found out after some investigating at his end that the developer had come up with a cunning plan to exploit players - and this one is actually rather ingenious in an evil mastermind kinda way.

They had included rare item drops (like those you'd find in any MMORPG) at a stable rate of seven per week. These items would then scale up in terms of rarity depending on how long Abstractism had been up and running on the player's machine. The developer was obviously looking to get players to leave the game running for as long as possible (for better drop rate chances), to get the best items and either use or resell on the Steam marketplace. SidAlpha came to the conclusion that the game was actually mining for cryptocurrency in the background, using the power of the player-owned PC, essentially making it a ruthless scam.

Valve has obviously come to the same conclusion, removed the game from its store, and banned the developer in question. There is still some discussion since Valve changed its Steam content policies recently, allowing the company to be able to decide more freely what can be on Steam and what can't. The main line that has been drawn in the digital sand is that they don't want anything illegal or the trolls players, although Valve never fully clarified what these terms actually mean in detail for any given territory.

Valve kills Steam game for secretly mining for cryptocurrency


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