Steam indie purge deletes 3000 games in Christmas cleanup

Steam has snapped: the Valve-ran storefront has swiftly removed over 2500 games from the service in a surprise Steam indie purge of content.

Discovered by Reddit user thomasthe1st, Valve is cleaning up their clogged storefront through an extermination of low-performance indie titles.

Following the Steam tracking website Madjoki, you can see that Steam is quickly killing thousands of smaller titles on Steam. More titles appear to be chucked into Valve’s virtual incinerators every few minutes with the current number just under 3000.

Most of the titles being removed appear to be indie games; the service’s “banned” list doesn’t appear to include any popular titles at first glance. Most of the game’s purged from the service appear to be cheaper indie projects, some could even be considered shovelware.

Valve has often been criticised for its daily slew of unfinished, broken, bigoted and straight up bad titles that fill the digital storefront, an area that the Epic Games Store has taken in stride. With Steam’s poor quality control, well-developed indie games are often buried under waves of low-quality games – like a glowing survivor in a horde of World War Z-esque zombies.

Valve’s Steam indie purge may be the company’s first real attempt at reigning in quality control for the store, although decent quality control in the first place would have been a swell idea.

Outside of its Steam Christmas cleanup, Valve is surprisingly back to making video games! With Half-Life: Alyx coming out early next year, the developer is certainly bucking up its ideas in a more competitive world.