Abstractism, a “relaxing” platformer that’s been available on the Steam platform since March, was pulled from the store on July 30th after some investigative work by unsuspecting players revealed the developer’s nefarious subterfuge. As Polygon explained in their post on the situation:
“The game is called Abstractism, which was said to not only infiltrate players’ computers with [cryptocurrency] mining software, but also dupe them through falsified items on the Steam Marketplace. But not long after these accusations started circulating, it has been taken off Steam.”
Later in the day Polygon received a statement from Valve who said “we have removed Abstractism and banned its developer from Steam for shipping unauthorized code, trolling, and scamming customers with deceptive in-game items”. To dissuade this kind of item-duping deception, Valve then instituted a system of confirmation messages that players need to click through in order to confirm item trade offers for games that Steam has identified they have never played.
Valve’s Tony Paloma explained that the measure was only a temporary solution in a Reddit thread, stating that “we are hopeful that having to dismiss two warning dialogs will be sufficient to make people think twice about trades containing forged items, but this is not the end of our response, and we’ll continue to monitor, of course”.