Sometimes there are news stories that are so bizzare that they defy all logic for attempting to unravel exactly how they happened. Recently an indie game known as Abstractism was removed from Steam and the developer has been banned from the platform. Now to many the game just seems to be a simple platformer with some unique artsy mechanics however this goes far deeper than anything we have know before.
You see the problems were first brought to attention thanks to the Team Fortress 2 trading community where a user claimed that he was scammed out of a very valuable item. You see Abstractism has the unique and very random trait that it’s one of the few games that allows people to buy and sell actual items on the community page of the game. Where it differs however is that people were able to manipulate the name, description and the picture of these items meaning that users could make these useless things from Abstractism seem like they are much more valuable items from other games, which allowed one person to scam a valuable item from this Team Fortress 2 trader.
Now this in itself is suspicious however it gets far weirder from here. You see this game was using far more computational power than it should have been when people were playing it. A unique executable file in the game’s directory started up when the game was played and the developer claimed that this was to allow the trading and selling of items within the game. However suspicions were that in fact this file was being used to mine cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, remotely using other player’s computing power. It seems as those these rumours might have some truth to them as in response to all of this Valve swiftly removed the game from their store.
All I will say to this is that I’m glad Valve took steps to prevent people being taken advantage of however with their brand new open doors policy to new releases on Steam it seems they will have to get used to things like this happening. Steam may very well become a much less welcoming place over time. That’s all for now, and as always. It’s not just a game, It’s a Life.