As gaming development gets easier and more accessible, great things can happen. Take, for example, the hit indie titles Dwarf Fortress and BattleBit: Remastered. However — it also means that there are a ton of low-effort indie video games being released every week.
In a seeming effort to crack down on some of these lackluster video games, Steam recently banned around 70 titles from the store all at once.
These titles have dubious names like Chinese mother in law, Park Walk, and 3D Pacman, the latter of which game was developed by a developer known as xxGame, not Namco or Atari.
We looked a bit more into some of these games, like Chinese mother in law, and the result was, well — the game description speaks for itself,
This is a RPG game.
You and your girlfriend are very much in love.
When you and your girlfriend plan to get married, visit her parents.
But her parents demanded a large “betrothal gift”.
For that, you have to make money.
You can get money by killing enemies
You can get money by working in a factory
Money can be gained by exploring the remains of the battlefield
Many of the other games looked like they had featured artwork made by AI or created by hand in MS Paint, and we weren’t able to find any from the list that appeared to be “legit” titles, though we didn’t look through every single one. It’s possible that some of these games aren’t asset flips at all — but were banned for some other reason, but we won’t know until Valve makes an official announcement.
Steam, the premier PC gaming platform, is no stranger to such titles, with influencers and YouTubers gleefully playing through lackluster indie games that reuse assets from the Unreal Store. Some of these, like the recent hit Only Up!, which was temporarily taken off the Steam Store for alleged copyright concerns, have become more of an online phenomenon. Still, the vast majority are relegated to the dark corners of the Steam store.
We contacted Steam for comment but have not received a response.
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