Valve Corporation, the company behind the gaming platform Steam, has sprung into action. It has removed the game called Abstractism from the platform in response to wrongful exploitative actions of the game’s developers involving cryptojacking. The issue came to light when quite a few customer complaints started to roll in about the game. Besides this, there were also issues with the game’s performance metrics which led to the increasing suspicion of crypto jacking.
The game was being marketed as a simple platformer. It would allow the player to take control of a few pixels, which would have to be carried across to the end of the level. In this case, the player would be controlling a simple square situated in a black-and-white landscape. The player’s only task is to make the pixel hop from one wall to the other. This basic objective makes the game sounds like a simple enough game that is entertaining at the same time.
The game was also priced economically, considering the prices of other games on the Steam platform. The retail price of the game was a meager $0.99. There was even a special promotion held which reduce the price by 51 percent. All this transpired until August when the game saw itself being pulled from the platform altogether.
The developers, Okalu Union were the brains behind the game. They published the game in partnership with dead.team. Even though there was a ban on not only the game but also the publishers of the game, there are still apps made by Okalu Union on Google’s Play Store. This has left people wondering whether they have some sort of cryptocurrency mining software hidden within the Okalu Union apps listed on the store.
To make matters a bit shadier, the developers seem to lack any concrete online presence. There is no sign that a website for Okalu Union exists. This makes things a little unclear about their legitimacy.
The other publisher which also faces a ban, dead.team, does have a website. It is just that their website does not exactly qualify for online presence. It is obvious that they abandoned the website soon after creating it. They did not put in any real effort to update the contents. The official page for dead.team only has a couple of entries in total. One was made on the 26th of May this year and the first one was made back in November 2017.
The game is so simple that it will barely need any calculable amount of GPU and CPU processing power. The game even asks the players to keep it on as long as possible for them. When you look at the nature of the game, the request doesn’t make any sense.
Fake Copies of Rare Items
The initial suspicion about the game was noticed by players when it was using too much GPU and CPU processing power. This didn’t make much sense considering the simplistic nature of the game. This turned out to be one of the red flags, which gamers are now aware of and actively lookout for.
However, Abstractism did not stop at that. As if hijacking the computing power of users to mine Monero tokens wasn’t bad enough, the game developers went even further.
It makes sense if one thinks about it. The greedy only get greedier. Their greedy scheme involved selling game items which were similar to the rare items found in other games. Gamers on Steam are extremely passionate about such items. Some vulnerable gamers started playing into their hands and the publishers found an additional revenue generation source.
Several players bought these items thinking they could be used in other games. It turned out that they’re useless in other games. They weren’t even useful in Abstractism itself.
Steam has noticed an increase in such fake games which are cheaply priced. Besides Abstractism, it has been working on removing these games and has removed over 200 games in July alone.
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