Valve kills shovelware "game" company

[Robert Maxwell]

Too bad, so sad.

I don't see anyone apart from representatives of Silicon Echo lamenting this. They had a scammy business model, produced laughable "games," and now they've been yanked from Steam and essentially put out of business.

Some seem to be worried that Valve's more proactive stance might be bad news for other indie developers, but Silicon Echo appears to have been a particularly egregious case, an outlier so bad the only prudent course was to boot them from Steam for good.

 

[kirk55555]

Valve takes forever to do anything against developers who behave badly, so I doubt any legitimate indie developer (ones who don't just asset flip or put up 30 copies of the same game with different names, among other sleazy tactics) will ever be harmed by Valve. Heck, it took Digital Homicide suing them to get user info for another bullshit lawsuit for Valve to shut those nutjobs down. That seems to have helped get Valve a bit more on board with taking down bad "developers", but they still aren't all that fast at reacting, so I think people who aren't taking advantage of the system will be fine. Unless the person/company in question is doing a lot bad at once, they don't seem to be in much danger, much less people who are doing nothing wrong.

 

[Reverend]

Saying Steam is being "more proactive" about curating it's store, is like saying "the ocean is getting more dry". Any pro-activity at all is noteworthy in it's own right and they have a long way to go before they're in any danger of negatively impacting legitimate indie devs. If anything, chucking out the dross can only serve to make discoverability easier for any potential customers.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Are you kidding there are games for sale right now that are just empty games..

For example.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/674010/The_Old_Empire/

No actual game yet but they are taking people's money for a screen saying "coming next year"

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Are you kidding there are games for sale right now that are just empty games..

For example.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/674010/The_Old_Empire/

No actual game yet but they are taking people's money for a screen saying "coming next year"

Uh, yeah, that's called a "preorder." It's common and completely different from what this thread is about.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Uh, yeah, that's called a "preorder." It's common and completely different from what this thread is about.

Yeah but most companies take your oder don't give you some empty space thing. You wait for your order and it downloads on day 1.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Yeah but most companies take your oder don't give you some empty space thing. You wait for your order and it downloads on day 1.

The first screenshot does say straight up that the game is not available yet. What more do people want? If someone is dumb enough to hand their money over to someone explicitly saying "THIS GAME IS NOT OUT YET" then I guess that's how it goes.