Something strange appears to be happening on Steam, where, as chronicled by Steam Tools, roughly 1000 games have been suddenly removed from the system. Some of the “banned” games look a little sketchy but others seem like fairly normal games (for Steam at least), and have been on the platform for months or years.
Glasswinged Ascension, for instance, has been on Steam since mid-2017, and is still listed on IndieDB, while Mind Trap has been around for about the same length of time. Electric Highways had more than 1300 very positive user reviews before it was removed (we also included it in a 2018 Free Games of the Week roundup) and Masha Rescues Grandma, a casual puzzle-adventure released in 2016 and removed a couple of hours ago, actually has a walkthrough video on YouTube with nearly 49,000 views.
None of the removed games are mainstream by any means, and there’s a lot of garbage to sift through, but that’s Steam in a nutshell. And given its anything goes approach to new releases, there’s nothing in the list that leaps out as being especially out of line.
By my count, 982 games have been removed from the service over the past four hours. It’s very odd and we’re not sure why it’s happening, but we’ve reached out to Valve for more information and we’ll update when we figure it out.
Thanks, PCGamesN.