Steam just deleted hundreds of games from the store

The Christmas period is a good time to give your house a bit of a deep clean in lieu of decorations and having guests over. Valve appears to be taking this sentiment to heart this year, as it’s begun a clear-out of Steam’s archives.

Spotted by Reddit user thomasthe1st, according to the banned list on madjoki.com’s Steam tracker, Valve is in the midst of a huge dumping of games and projects that are clogging up the storefront’s digital shelf-space. Starting with Bloodbath Kavkaz, hundreds and hundreds of games have been banned from the service, more coming almost every second. The additions are almost uniformly cheap indie projects, many of which are hard to find information on beyond their now deleted Steam pages. At time of writing the overall amount deleted is at just over 2550, having jumped up several hundred within the last two hours.

Before this purge, there was a steady drip of deletions, as evidenced by going back through madjoki’s records. Most happened in small clumps, sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly, but nothing anywhere near this scale. There’s been pressure on Valve for years to increase moderation on Steam, to have more stringent guidelines for what’s acceptable on the service and what isn’t, from bigoted content to asset flips and so on. This certainly looks like it might be a step in that direction.

This isn’t the only piece of surprising behaviour from Valve. After years of silence on the Half-Life series, the studio revealed a new game in the iconic series. Coming out March 2020, Half-Life: Alyx is a VR project set in-between the first and second Half-Life. Though it’s not the fabled Half-Life 3, to see any new Half-Life at all after 12 years is still something.

Talking Steam specifically, Destiny 2 shot to the top of the charts in its first month on the platform, dominating the charts for October. After eight years apart, EA returned to Steam with EA Access, its own subscription service on the Steam store, of which Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was the first release.