Tag Archives: Valve

Valve Set A Trap To Catch And Ban 40,000 Dota 2 Players

Gaming, ,

Polygon reported Valve issued an update to Dota 2 recently that patched an exploit used by players using third-party cheating clients, and in doing so, created a “honeypot” to catch those cheaters.

According to Polygon, the battle to address cheating extends much further than just Dota 2 and Valve; several companies with popular games have gone as far as taking cheat makers to court in an attempt to hold them accountable for the practice.

Most recently Bungie won a $4.3 million lawsuit against Destiny 2 cheat developer AimJunkies – a website that sells cheats for a number of different games, including several for Valve’s own games. That $4.3 million win is on top of another $2 million it won alongside Valiant developer Riot Games in a settlement against GatorCheats.

Valve posted news titled: “Cheaters Will Never Be Welcome in Dota” In the news, Valve provided details about how many cheaters it banned. The news was posted on February 21, 2023.

“Today, we permanently banned over 40,000 accounts that were using third-party software to cheat in Dota over the last few weeks. This software was able to access information used internally by the Dota client that wasn’t visible during normal gameplay, giving the cheater an unfair advantage.

“While fixing the underlying issues that made these cheats possible was a priority, we have also decided remove these bad actors from the active Dota playerbase.

“With that goal in mind, we released a patch as soon as we understood the method these cheats were using. This patch created a honeypot: a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay, but that could be read by these exploits. Each of the accounts banned today read from this “secret” area in the client, giving us extremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved.

“The prevalence of this family of cheats means that today’s ban wave is particularly large, but it’s only the latest action in an ongoing campaign. While the battle against cheaters and cheat developers often takes place in the shadows, we wanted to make this example visible, and use it to make our position clear: If you are running any application that reads data from the Dota client as you’re playing games, your account can be permanently banned from playing Dota. This includes professional players, who will be banned from all Valve competitive events.

“Dota is a game best enjoyed when played on an even field, where victories are earned by skill and tenacity. We expect that some players will continue to develop and use new exploits, to continue to detect and remove these exploits at the expense of other players. As before, we will continue to detect and remove these exploits as they come, and continue to ban users who cheat…”

In my opinion, nobody wants to play in a game against cheaters. The cheaters give themselves an unfair advantage over those who enjoy playing a video game and taking the time to build up their characters without cheating. There is always going to be a risk to cheaters who fool around with a cheat exploit. 40,000 of those cheaters are now finding out why they shouldn’t have cheated.

Valve Bans Blockchain Games and NFTs on Steam

Gaming, , ,

Valve has made an update to its “What You Shouldn’t Publish on Steam” list. That list includes things that one would hope game creators would know better than to publish in a game. It makes sense for Valve to spell things out very clearly, in order to avoid problems.

A new addition to the list disallows “Applications built on blockchain technology that issue or allow exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs”. I expect that some people will not be happy about this, especially those who built games involving one of both of those things.

For example, The Verge reported that this change was pointed out by SpacePirate_io, on Twitter, who appears to be the developer of a game called Age of Rust.

One of the tweets in SpacePirate_io’s thread says: “Steam’s point of view is that items have value and they don’t allow items that can have real-world value on their platform. While I respect their choice, I fundamentally believe that NFTs and blockchain games are the future. It’s why I started this journey with all of you”.

According to The Verge, there have been some situations involving NFTs that have been sketchy. One example is the CS:GO skins and Team Fortress 2 hats. The Verge also notes the Evolved Apes saga, “where a developer sold NFTs with the promise that they’d be included in a fighting game but then seemingly took the money and ran.”

Where can developers of games that include blockchain or NFTs go? The answer appears to be Epic Games.

Epic Games CEO & Founder Tim Sweeney tweeted: “Epic Games Store will welcome games that make use of blockchain tech provided they follow the relevant laws, disclose their terms, and are age-rated by an appropriate group. Though Epic’s not using crypto in our games, we welcome innovation in the areas of technology and finance.”

In my opinion, welcoming games that use blockchain technology and NFTs could be a big gamble for Epic Games. That decision may cause people who play video games, and who dislike blockchain based games, to select games that don’t have that stuff in them. I’ve seen some tweets in which people encourage others to avoid buying games from companies that welcome the types of games that Valve has removed from Steam.

Steam Store will Contain “Something That You Hate”

Gaming,

Valve posted a blog titled “Who Gets To Be On The Steam Store?” The short answer appears to be: everyone. Steam has decided to opt-out of making decisions about whether or not a specific game should be removed from the Steam Store – except for things they “decide are illegal, or straight up trolling.”

In the blog post, Valve says: “The challenge is that this problem is not simply about whether or not the Steam Store should contain games with adult or violent content.” Instead, Valve says it’s about “whether or not the Store contains games with an entire range of controversial topics.” Those topics include: politics, sexuality, racism, gender, violence, identity, and so on.”

So what does this mean? It means that the Steam Store is going to contain something that you hate, and don’t think should exist. Unless you don’t have any opinions, that’s guaranteed to happen. But you’re also going to see something on the Store that you believe should be there, and some other people will hate it and want it not to exist.

Valve has provided reasons why they made this decision. They point out that Valve is not a small company, and that it isn’t homogeneous. The people at Valve don’t all agree on what deserves to be in the Store. Valve says that what is considered acceptable varies around the world, both socially and legally.

In short, Valve has decided that the way to solve this dilemma is to …do almost nothing at all. Valve feels it should not be deciding what belongs on the Steam Store. They feel they shouldn’t be choosing for players what content they can or cannot buy. Valve also doesn’t feel it should be choosing what kind of content a game developer is allowed to create.

Valve has concluded that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, “except for things we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling.” At the same time, they want players to understand that the games Valve allows on the Steam Store “will not be a reflection of Valve’s values”.

In addition, Valve is going to provide players with tools that will allow them to override Valve’s game recommendation algorithms and hide games containing topics that the player is not interested in. The options will also allow parents to control what kinds of games their kids see.

Campo Santo has Joined Valve

Gaming,

Campo Santo announced that the company has agreed to join Valve. I haven’t been able to find a statement about this from Valve. Kotaku reported that three people familiar with the news confirmed that Valve had purchased Campo Santo.

Campo Santo describes itself as “a small but scrappy game developer in San Francisco, CA.” They released Firewatch in 2016 and have sold over 1.5 million copies. They are co-producing a full adaptation of Firewatch and working on their second game, In the Valley of Gods.

Valve has produced award-winning games, leading-edge technologies, and a groundbreaking social entertainment platform. They are the makers of Half-Life, Half-Life Episodes 1 and 2, Left 4 Dead, Left for Dead 2, Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, Portal, and Portal 2. Valve has a social entertainment platform called Steam that gives players instant access to more than 1,800 game titles and connects 35 million active users to each other.

Campo Santo posted a blog titled “Campo Santo News” that has more details about their recent decision to join Valve. Here are a few key points:

The twelve of use at Campo Santo have agreed to join Valve, where we will maintain our jobs as video game developers and continue production on our current project, In the Valley of the Gods…

…In Valve, we found a group of folks who, to their core, feel the same way about the work that they do (this, you may be surprised to learn, doesn’t happen every day). In us, they found a group with unique experience and valuable, diverse perspectives. It quickly became an obvious match…

Campo Santo states that they are still making In the Valley of the Gods (as a Valve game), and will still support Firewatch.

Valve will Replace Greenlight with Steam Direct

Gaming, ,

Valve announced that they will replace Steam Greenlight with Steam Direct. The reason for the change is to better serve their goal of making customers happy. Steam decided it needed to move away from a small group of people at Valve trying to predict which games would appeal to different groups of customers.

Steam Greenlight was launched because Valve felt it was a useful stepping stone for moving to a more direct distribution system. Greenlight is a community-focused program that uses a voting system to determine which games are published on Steam. Games that got enough community support are “greenlit”.

Valve is replacing Greenlight with a new direct sign-up system for developers to put their games on Steam. It is called Steam Direct.

This new path, which we’re calling “Steam Direct”, is targeted for Spring 2017 and will replace Steam Greenlight. We will ask new developers to complete a set of digital paperwork, personal or company verification, and tax documents similar to the process of applying for a bank account. Once set up, developers will pay a recoupable application fee for each new title they wish to distribute, which is intended to decrease the noise in the submission pipeline.”

At the moment, Valve is still debating what that application fee should be. They talked to several developers and studios about an appropriate fee, and they got a range of responses from $100 to $5,000. Valve wants more feedback before it settles on what the fee will be.

The existence of a fee might dissuade people from trying to get low-quality games onto Steam. That being said, if the fee is too high, it might make it difficult or impossible for small companies, or independent game creators, from being able to afford to get their game on Steam.