Valve Issues Restrictions to Titles That Do Not Meet Confidence Metric in Developer's Fight Against Fake Games

One of the persistent issues that Valve is facing is the spread of fake games on Steam, and the company decided to apply restrictions to titles that fell short of the platform’s "confidence metric."

Recently, Reddit user deliteplays discovered Valve’s announcement (via DualShockers) of new measures to counter the spread of fake games exploiting the platform’s Trading Cards system to earn money. This same issue previously forced Steam to update the Trading Cards, which led to the launch of the confidence metric.

Now, Valve has intensified its fight against fake games. If a title wanting access Trading Cards fails to achieve a good standing based on the confidence metric, Valve will issue certain restrictions.

On Valve’s statement dated June 14, the said limitations include capping the achievements to 100. In addition to that, achievements of dubious titles will also not be covered in Steam’s global achievement coun and will not appear in the developer’s Steam profile. Titles and developers that do not have satisfactory stats for the confidence metric are also no longer eligible for Coupons.

According to Valve, it decided to apply these changes after learning that fake developers were still taking advantage of the achievement system by “inflating” their records displayed on their profiles. Although the number of fake developers carrying out these methods is “insignificant,” Valve says they still confuse Steam’s algorithms and, especially, the users.

It can be recalled that Valve launched the confidence metric in 2017 after learning the number of fake developers exploiting the Trading Cards system to generate Steam keys and then rake in profit. This process motivates bogus developers to put up fake games on the digital distribution site.

At the time, Valve announced, “Instead of starting to drop Trading Cards the moment they arrive on Steam, we're going to move to a system where games don't start to drop cards until the game has reached a confidence metric that makes it clear it's actually being bought and played by genuine users.”

Since the changes were applied in 2017, cards have been distributed to all users only after the title fulfills the metric requirements.