A total of 248 games from a single developer have suddenly disappeared from Steam. This is by no means a mistake, but rather a deliberate intervention by Valve.
Which studio is it? You may have come across the name Atomic Fabrik on your forays through the Steam store. This developer has an absurdly high number of games on Steam, most of which are cheap productions.
Atomic Fabrik is a studio that uses the “asset flip” method. This involves buying ready-made assets, i.e. elements for a game, and reusing them with minimal modifications. A popular case of a game that was created in this way was the recent scandal surrounding The Day Before.
But that alone is not enough for Steam to simply delete almost 250 games from the platform. The methods Atomic Fabrik used to make money in the past are much more to blame.
Valve itself recently secretly developed a new game – read on MeinMMO what it’s all about. You can also see the trailer here:
This is what the gameplay of Valve’s new game Sleet Fighter looks like
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Expensive games and many positive reviews
How did the business model work? Many games from Atomic Fabrik had absurdly high prices on Steam. Here you had to pay far more than the classic full price of 60 euros. 90 euros and more was normal, and individual games even cost up to 260 euros.
If you were willing to spend that much money, your justifiably high expectations were disappointed. The games were of low quality and not worth the asking price. Despite that, they had numerous positive reviews on Steam. How was that possible?
The trick was to initially offer a game cheaply, often for just under 1 euro. Positive reviews were then bought and the rating improved. The studio then continually increased the price of a game to such an extent that hardly anyone would buy it the traditional way.
The games then found their way into random key bundles that users can buy through third-party sellers. These usually only cost a few euros and promise a certain number of random games – but at the same time also a certain quality based on Steam reviews.
Since Atomic Fabrik’s games already had many (purchased) positive reviews at that point, they fell into this category. In this way, the studio continued to sell its titles, only via keys. A developer has 5,000 of these available for each game on Steam.
By the way, it is not relevant whether buyers of the key bundles leave a bad review afterwards. This is because the bundles only calculate reviews that come in via direct purchases. Keys do not count.
Valve has now intervened in this case and deleted a large part of Atomic Fabrik’s catalog from Steam. Did you already know the studio and their games? Have you played one? Feel free to write us your experiences in the comments. Another game on Steam recently had to contend with accusations of being a scam. Read on MeinMMO what this is all about and what experts have to say about it.