More than 170 'trolling' games removed from Steam in two weeks

The Steam team continues to purge its marketplace of titles it deems to be "outright trolling" with close to 200 games pulled in the past fortnight alone.

PC Gamer estimates that 179 titles have been pulled in recent weeks, including a combination of full titles, games split into separate episodes and some that were simply reskinned and listed individually with new games.

Among the wave of titles removed were seven with the word 'hentai' in the title, as well as the 32 games of the Achievement Hunter series. Other highlights the site picked out include Boobs Battleground, Logan vs KSI, Putin Boobs and Trump, Rich Life Simulator VR, Bitcoin Highway, MILF and Make Border Great Again - none of which are likely to be a huge loss to the store.

The crackdown is part of Valve's continuing efforts to ban developers from its marketplace who are "straight up trolling" - a vague description the firm first used in June when it announced an 'anything goes' approach to curation, whereby only trolling or illegal games will be banned.

Last month, the firm offered more clarification as to what it means by 'trolling' in a post that also introduced the Adults Only filter for games with explicit sexual content.

"Our review of something that may be 'a troll game' is a deep assessment that actually begins with the developer," Valve wrote at the time. "We investigate who this developer is, what they've done in the past, their behaviour on Steam as a developer, as a customer, their banking information, developers they associate with, and more. All of this is done to answer the question 'who are we partnering with and why do they want to sell this game?'

"We get as much context around the creation and creator of the game and then make an assessment. A trend we're seeing is that we often ban these people from Steam altogether instead of cherry-picking through their individual game submissions. In the words of someone here in the office: 'it really does seem like bad games are made by bad people.'

"This doesn't mean there aren't some crude or lower quality games on Steam, but it does mean we believe the developers behind them aren't out to do anything more than sell a game they hope some folks will want to play."

It's still all a little vague, but the recent removals do at least suggest the company is making some effort into clearing up the crowded store and giving context to its lack of curation - something our Brendan Sinclair described as a "gutless attempt to dodge responsibility."

PC Gamer notes that, as always, Steam users who have previously purchased the removed titles will still be able to download them whenever they want.