Introduction
In the beginning Steam was a product created by Valve to distribute their own games. After it turned out to be surprisingly popular (being pretty much the first viable online store application for the purchase and digital distribution of video games), they opened the platform for other game developer companies to sell and distribute their games. Steam became an absolutely enormous success, and to this day it's still by far the biggest such distribution platform on PC, regardless of all the competition that has spawned once this form of distribution of games turned out to be a very well working model.
The problem with Steam, from the perspective of tons of game developers, especially indie ones, was that it was only open to certain manually-picked big corporations. Indie devs had no chance of getting their games sold on Steam. This was a big grievance for years.
Thus Valve created the so-called Greenlight system, which opened Steam for anybody. In order to avoid the platform being flooded with junk, spam, malware, vandalism and so on, the system required for developers to submit a proposal for their game for people to vote (ie. "greenlight" it). If a proposal got enough user votes, it would be accepted to be published.
At first this worked like marvel. Most indie games published in this manner were of surprisingly high quality, even the worst ones being, at the very worst, mediocre but acceptable.
The problem
But, like with everything else, of course less scrupulous people started finding out ways to game the system. They would submit proposals that were edited to look much better than they really were, and dupe people into greenlighting them, and then in actuality doing the absolutely minimum effort in the actual game, which turned out to be absolute unplayable junk that cannot be even considered a "game" at all.
And, of course, and as always, hackers started developing automated bot voters that would automatically greenlight their submissions, no matter what they were, thus bypassing the hurdle of having to have a big number of users accept their submission in the first place.
Thus were born the so-called "asset flippers". And Steam got absolutely flooded with them. These are really simplistic crappy games with the absolute minimum effort put into them, and copied multiple times as "different" games, with just some game assets (graphics, models, sounds...) changed to make screenshots look different enough (ie. an "asset flip"). Thus you could have the exact same crappy game published a dozen times on Steam, just with some changed graphics and sounds.
It became infinitely worse when Valve implemented trading cards into Steam. Every game can have a set of trading cards which users would earn by playing the game. These trading cards can be sold on the Steam market. (The price of these trading cards is based purely on a supply-and-demand economy, with people people offering the cards at a given price, and other people perhaps buying them, with the cheapest ones being more likely sold more easily. Prices for these cards typically range from less than 5 cents to even over 20 cents. Some really rare and sought after foil cards may be bought at over 2€ and even more.) Trading cards can also be converted into "gems", which are a generic "currency" that can also be sold, or used for other purposes, such as creating booster packs (which can themselves of course also be sold.)
The problem with this system is that the hackers also figured out a way to game the system, and get free money from people with their asset-flipping "games": Have a game published, assign the allowed amount of trading cards to it, give Steam keys for the game to a couple thousand bots, have those bots "buy" the game using those keys, fool Steam to think that they are playing the game, get the cards, and either put those cards on sale or, more likely, convert them to gems, and sell those gems, or create booster packs of a completely different game with those gems, and sell those. This costs pretty much nothing for the hacker, but he receives free money from users who are buying those gems or booster packs.
The "solution"
This went for many years. Recently Valve tried to solve this problem by getting rid of the "Greenlight" system and replacing it with something entirely different: Now in order to submit your game on Steam, you have to pay $100. You get this money back after your game sells one thousand copies.
At first glance this does sound indeed like a solution to the problem. No longer can these hackers just use bots to bypass the system and have their games published. Now they would need to pay actual money, which they might never get back, and nobody would do that, would they? If you think that, you are as naive as Valve was.
You see, the problem has only gotten worse with that change. With Greenlight there was a mandatory voting period for something to be accepted into Steam. Now that voting period is gone. Anybody can have any game of theirs immediately accepted into Steam, by simply paying that $100. Nobody will check it, nobody will vote on it, there's absolutely no oversight.
Did I mention the thousands of bots that the hackers are using to "purchase" the game using Steam keys? That's right. The hackers can just keep doing what they did before, and they will get their money reimbursed once a thousand bots have "purchased" the game. And now there are even less hurdles to overcome, and it can be done much faster.
This is not just theoretical. It's actually happening. Many commentators and reviewers are pointing out the sheer amount of asset flips that are flooding Steam.
So, when trying to "fix" the problem of asset flippers gaming the system, Valve has only made it easier for them to do that, not harder. They have made the problem worse.
Does this affect me?
"I don't buy Steam trading cards, nor do I buy these asset-flips. Does this really affect me?"
Yes, it does. It affects Steam as a content distribution platform, and it affects legitimate indie developers even more, and thus it affects you.
Some of the greatest and most appreciated games out there are made by very small indie developer teams, sometimes even just individual people. The game Undertale is the perfect example. It's considered by many to be the best indie game of 2015, and even one of the top 10 games of that year period. And it was developed by one single person.
It didn't have any big advertisement campaigns on newspapers, TV and online. Its fame came mostly by word of mouth.
Now imagine if the game had been buried under hundreds of crappy asset-flip scamming "games", and would thus have gone completely unnoticed. Currently there isn't even a Greenlight system on Steam to have people notice the game and spread knowledge of it. Under the current system it would have just appeared one day on Steam out of nowhere, and probably just buried under all the junk, and not many would have noticed it.
(Granted, big part of the fame came from the fact that the game was crowdfunded, which spread the word of mouth in itself, but not all indie games, even the great ones, are developed like that.)
The scamming asset-flippers are hurting the platform and legitimate indie developers, which in the end hurts you as a gamer.
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