Steam Overhauling Trading Cards System Because of 'Fake Games'

"Remove the economic incentive that's at the root of the problem."

By Hope Corrigan

Valve  is bringing some big changes to the Steam trading card system in order to prevent fake games exploits.

A Steam blog post has addressed an issue around trading cards, in which fake games were being created to generate cards which could then be sold on the market for profit.

The process comes from an allowance Steam gives to developers which lets them generate thousands of keys for their games. Where this becomes a problem is when these fake developers do this for fraudulent games and then use bots to have the games run idle and collect trading cards.

Steam says that the profiteering side of the exploit is only part of the problem, as the bots can potentially have an impact on the Steam Store's algorithm. Having a fake game played by many bots means the algorithm runs the risk of mistaking it for a popular title and may begin to suggest it to real players.

Rather than remove legitimate developers' ability to generate keys, Steam has opted to only make trading cards available once games reach a confidence metric. This means that until enough genuine users have bought and played a game, cards will not be obtained for that game. Once, however, the game has reached the confidence metric, cards will become available and will be back paid to anyone for previous play.

Steam hopes that this will both reduce the financial gain for fake releases on Steam as well as improve the quality of the data collected and used by its algorithms.

Valve's recent announcement to end Greenlight in favour of a paid program called Steam Direct should also assist in weeding out fake games.

Hope Corrigan is a freelance news writer who has 0.08 cents in her Steam wallet. You can find her on the internet.

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