A Steam game has been caught secretly forcing user’s computers to mine cryptocurrency, yet another incident that will damage Valve’s reputation and make DRM-submissive gamers once again question their process of approving games.
The culprit game, “Abstractism” (a platformer), had been receiving a flood of negative reviews, with some claiming that the game installed a virus disguised as a “steam.exe” process along with malware – screenshots:
One individual did further research and concluded that the viruses might have been cryptocurrency mining software:
The game’s heavy use of CPU and GPU was one hint toward this conclusion, which numerous players have been reporting, though the game’s developer – Okalo Union – believed that this was due to players having “high graphics settings” even though the title was a simple platformer that apparently had low system requirements.
A recent news post from the developer also added further suspicion as it encouraged that players keep the game running all day for item drops, and to be in-game once the drop limit is reset.
Even more concrete however is the developer directly admitting to his misdeeds, though the comment has since been deleted:
In addition to mining cryptocurrency, the developer had been introducing Steam community items to the game that completely replicated the appearance of rare Team Fortress 2 items, causing one unlucky soul to get scammed in a trade:
Abstractism has since been removed, but given past controversies and some seemingly unkept promises, this occurrence will likely only drag Valve’s name even further through the mud…
This should be criminalized with a real prison time
The fact this got through is very poor quality control on Valve’s part.
If it can contain a crypto currency miner it can just as easily contain something that could log keystrokes or a root kit.
The sooner people realize Steam is a poor platform the better.
The absence of a successful and competitive platform shouldn’t condone Steam’s lacking quality. Unfortunately, almost nothing, aside from a severely outraged community, can put Valve in check.
is it tho? the only good alternative is gog
Only if you like to put dicks in your anus
If GoG is like putting a dick in your anus, then Origin is like stuffing an anus into your dick.
What about Desura and Itch then? The absolute trash pile that you’d have to be a youtuber that plays TERRIBLE games to get any mileage out of..
We know you do!
and what do you like? Origin?
Valve only gives a s♥♥t when their bottom line is at stake…and that’s the problem. Horrible quality control, bad customer service, abandoned IPs (we’ll never see HL3 in our lifetimes), and now malware.
Go elsewhere for your games.
OMG! We’ll never have HL3, that’s horrible. Such monsters!
Nice Stockholm Syndrome.
I’ve never really understood this passionated hatred towards Valve and Steam. Are you really that assblasted because you never got your HL3? You people are like children who didn’t get that candy that one time, long long time ago, and still hold a grudge for that.
How about the fact that Valve is the one that start lootbox business than everyone else?
Valve has an open sewer policy regarding quality control. You hand them the 100 bucks they hand you the publishing access to their platform. There is no quality control, that’s the issue.
Also There have already been games with equally nefarious code that have slipped through the cracks like games with modules that check log-in information on all browsers which the devs described as a method of ‘anti-piracy’.
Expect more of this crap to happen from here on out if Valve doesn’t start adding even the most basic of quality control(Even running the game through windows defender would have been able to fish out that cryptominer).
When you consider the amount of games Valve must screen each year, they likely don’t have the employees to do it.
What they should do is force developers to hold a limited beta of their games on Steam with a select number of trusted users that want to play the game to find s♥♥t like this. How hard would it be to create a new subgroup of people who want to Beta test s♥♥t on there? Free games would make a good incentive for some.
In 2017 Gabe net worth was $5.5B.
They have all the money to hire more people. They just lazy.
valve quality control is always sucks
getting scammed on some 50 cent trash platformer
thats just sad for everyone
Only 100 bucks to publish a trojan/data miner/keylogger. Just pretend it’s a denuvo like security program so people that are warned of it think it’s ok.
You people didn’t like Greenlight, so this is what you get.