Valve Makes Changes To Trading Card System, Fighting Fake Games Selling Fake Cards

Although it’s not exactly the biggest marketplace in the Steam storefront, it would seem that the platform’s trading card service has generated enough enthusiasm from users that there is now a thriving economy revolving around the commodity. Unfortunately, this also paved the way for developers making fake games to sell fake trading cards.

The whole issue centers on the practice that users have long suspected and Valve has just confirmed. Announcing that it will be implementing changes with how trading cards are given, the company admitted that fake game developers have been manipulating Steam’s greenlight system to make a ton of money off of fake trading cards.

Perpetrators basically create titles that have nothing to offer, provide bots with thousands of Steam keys, and just let them idle in order to earn trading cards. These bad actors would then sell these cards without ever having to offer anything of substance.

“These fake developers take advantage of a feature we provide to all developers on Steam, which is the ability to generate Steam keys for their games,” the Steam post reads. “They generate many thousands of these keys and hand them out to bots running Steam accounts, which then idle away in their games to collect Trading Cards. Even if no real players ever see or buy one of these fake games, their developers make money by farming cards.”

In order to combat this trend, Valve will be implementing a new system called a “confidence metric,” Kotaku reports. It’s basically an algorithmic setup, which tries to determine if a game is real or fake by looking at whether or not players are actually active on them. If the metric decides that a game is real, it will drop the trading cards.

Valve has been trying to fight the development and existence of fake games on its platform for months and this is just the latest in its efforts to finally stamp the practice out. Unfortunately, it’s practically a given that these parasites would soon find a way to get around the new fix to take advantage of players, once again.