A long-running story with Steam has been Valve having to put time and resources into fighting “bad actors” on the platform. These are people who use the storefront to do things like game the trading card system to generate profit with “fake” games, among other practices. Now, a game has been removed from Steam after players discovered some serious tomfoolery going on under the hood.
The game is Abstractism and, at face value, it was a simple platformer meant to be “relaxing.” But the community noticed something fishy was happening after the game was connected to some shenanigans happening on the Team Fortress 2 marketplace. Said marketplace was quickly flooded with items from Abstractism that were designed to look like rare items from Team Fortress 2 . After that, people started digging into the game and found something even more troubling.
Abstractism was being flagged for malware by user software, and people noticed it was using an intense amount of GPU and CPU for a platformer. People threw out accusations that Abstractism was actually using the game to mine cryptocurrency, and some bizarre and inconsistent statements from the developer pointed to Monero coins being the culprit. Not long after these discoveries and accusations, the game was removed from Steam and the developer was banned.
Source: Polygon