Valve embarking on a new, more active phase of the battle with card farmers. Henceforth the company will scrutinize all development requests, requiring too many clues to their games. Steam owners are tired of the very widespread type of fraud with cards and want to nip it in the bud.
More recently, a senior engineer Valve Shon Dzhenkin (Liiiroy Jenkins), said the company reserved the new law – to refuse developers, if the volume of their requirements do not match the volumes of sales of games created by them.
This statement sheds light on a new anti-fraudulent Valve program. Eagles Gabin clearly set a goal: to stop all those who are trying to publish games on Steam for any other purpose other than to make people play them.
For further discussion of its position the company even invented a new pejorative term “igropodobnye objects” – you all know, these “games” for 14 rubles, which are created only for one start dropping cards for resale..
“Over the past few years, updates and new features Steam changed the very nature of the use of keys. Now we are not talking about mere selling of exciting games to our customers. Hackers have begun using igropodobnye objects for monetization. The most glaring example – Pharming cards Steam “- says Liroy Dzhenkins.
“Our recent changes beneficial impact on the economy of the new maps in Steam, but cases of fraud by abuse of the keys is still a lot, with use for this is mainly igropodobnye objects. As a result, our company began to carefully look closely to the suspicious cases in which the developer is trying to present a product that is not even a game on our site. ”
“Let me give a concrete example of a situation. It sold 100 copies of the game, it collected by and large only negative reviews. However, the developer is requesting 500 thousand. The keys for it. We as a company are not interested in supporting the networks of bots and card farmers to the detriment of the real players. ”
“I want to emphasize that we will continue to provide our honest partners free keys so that they can sell their games and is Steam, to arrange their own seasons of discounts and trade Bundle. But we will not allow to carry out fraudulent activities and to mislead our customers. ”
After such a long confession Shona Dzhenkina from Valve should still focus on how Gabe struggle with card farmers affect the casual gamers. In the end, the farmers are not so much (the author personally knows of only one), and the rank and file players – the vast majority. Here are some of them we pechomsya. Valve, as it turns out, too.
In mid-May of this year, the company Gabe Newell began to gradually change the very card system, introducing the so-called “trust criteria”: the ultimate card can not just take and appear in a particular game – she will first have to prove itself among the real players.
All this is done to deal with the following fraud scheme: feykovy developer conducts through Steam Greenlight (now Direct) deliberately low-quality pacifier, requires a lot of keys from Valve supposedly for advertising or sales to other markets, launches its bots Idler, which beat cards. They are then sold on the Steam platform. The scheme simply brilliant – it requires that only two people, maybe even one. Oh, the whole basement of the Chinese, both in pharma Golda WoW, is clearly not necessary.
It is quite possible that you will say: “Let them filibusters digital age extract their money – they do not interfere with ordinary people, suffering only a capitalist Valve. And share it for all sorts of Artifact’y and shattered dreams of Half-Life 3 “. But you will not be partially right.
Tens of thousands of bots, Idler, hundreds of thousands of “simulated” clock – we are discussing the type of fraud generates monstrous volumes feykovyh data. And what is the result? You – yes, you personally – in recommendations pops up every e @ rmo because naive Steam on the basis of its purely mathematical algorithms thinks that these “objects igropodobnye” really play a lot – and honestly recommend them to you.
Remains one logical question: whether farmers will try to deceive the new “credibility test” Valve? After all, for the sake of easy money you can optionally register a little more sophisticated bot algorithm whose behavior becomes more like a real person.
Valve itself confidently declares its sophisticated algorithm, based on the huge database, in any case, be able to distinguish normal game and the real players of crafts and boats. Of course, the company does not go into the technical details, so that farmers can not take the first step back now.
It is clear that the company Gabe Newell decided to bring order to its electronic platform. Steam Greenlight is closed, to publish the game absolutely free is now impossible. Instead of a “green light” opened a new service Direct fixed registration fee for all developers – $ 100 for the placement of a single product.
But even this did not stop. In the first week of August on Steam appeared 215 new games, which was an absolute record in terms of weekly statistics.
This can only mean two things: 1) the peak of growth indie scene has not yet been reached, and 2) the farmers are not ready to give up just because of easy money, and each of their klikalka with the naked Japanese girl brings much more than a modest $ 100.
