Valve gets a lot of flak lately for its quality control issues. Rightfully so, in some cases. But at the same time, the company has been gradually making changes to Steam in an effort to directly fight certain problems, especially a certain sector of Steam built around abusing the trading card system.
One particular example of this is Silicon Echo Studios. It is a company notorious in the Steam community for pumping out dozens of egregious “shovelware” games clearly meant to generate trading cards for minimal effort. These games were also known as “asset flippers,” games made entirely with pre-built assets from game development engines such as Unity.
This company was essentially pumping out games in chunks to avoid paying fees for submitting games. It would then sell them for very little. People would then buy the games, use them to get trading cards easily, and sell the trading cards. This is a tony bit of money individually, but it adds up and the developers get a cut of trading card sales.
Valve has removed 173 of these games entirely from the storefront, indicating Steam has people getting their hands dirty and more strongly moderating the store. Valve indeed released a statement, confirming it has a team working on monitoring reports full-time in order to catch things like this in actions. Not only were the games removed, but Steam has “ended its business relationship” with the person responsible (who was found to be using multiple accounts).
Source: Polygon