Valve Bans More Than 40,000 Steam Accounts: Here’s Why

Cheating is a major concern for all online game publishers and developers, which is why Steam’s decision to ban thousands of accounts belonging to users who allegedly cheated, is not very surprising. Valve, the company behind the digital distributor Steam, is taking strict action against gamers looking to gain an unfair advantage in multiplayer games.

SteamDB, a third-party database for all of the steam accounts, reported a sudden spike in the number of account bans on the platform post the Steam Summer Sale’s closure. It is estimated that roughly 40,411 Steam accounts were banned after the sale ended on July 5.

Why 40,000 Steam Accounts Were Banned

Valve maintains a veritable Anti-Cheat program which scans all the Steam accounts for questionable activities or signs of cheating. The huge number of Steam account bans came on July 6, just a day after the Summer Sale ended. During the Steam Summer Sale, all the games were sold at a hefty discount so that gamers around the world could pick up their favorite titles at a minimal price.

However, for Steam account holders (whose accounts had been banned previously) the Steam Summer Sale was the perfect opportunity to set up a new account and purchase games they had in their previous account that they also purchased at a discounted rate. However, Valve anticipated this possible ploy from potential cheaters, and its anti-cheating mechanism monitored all the sales.

Cheaters were likely to pick up multiple copies of the same game at cheap prices. They would then build multiple accounts and test out each copy for the different hacks, to see which of the cheats were detected by Valve and which were not. Violation of Valve’s cheating policy meant that users could be banned from playing a particular game, or it could also mean a permanent Steam account ban.

Steam Users Respond To The Ban

After news about the wide-scale Steam ban surfaced, several users of Valve’s platform expressed their thoughts on Reddit. Most people seemed to be in favor of the strict decision taken by the digital distributor. Having faced cheaters in many multiplayer games, most users also expressed their disgust.

“Most of those kids are just wasting their parents money anyway so I doubt they even care,” a posted Reddit user shared.

Others noted that kids were not the only cheaters and that even older players try to find hacks so that they can get an unfair advantage over others. A minority of Reddit users claimed that while cheating is wrong in most multiplayer games, there isn’t anything unethical in practicing the same in some games like GTA Online.

[Featured Image by Vladimir Timofeev/iStockphoto]