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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

CCN:

Valve Corporation, the company behind the gaming website Steam, suddenly pulled a game called Abstractism from its store. Customer complaints and game performance point to another crypto jacking.

Abstractism has been marketed as a simple platformer where you control a bunch of pixels and try to carry it successfully to the other end of the level. In this case, you were managing a square in a black and white environment. All you had to do, was make it jump from one wall to the other — entertaining and straightforward enough.

[...] Players first noticed something was wrong when the game started using enormous amounts of CPU and GPU — the first red flag we’ve all grown used to spot by now. One customer accused the developer of crypto jacking, to which the company replied with a joke and a half-baked explanation.

Bitcoin is outdated, we currently use Abstractism to mine only Monero coins.

Abstractism does not mine any of cryptocurrency. Probably, you are playing on high graphics settings, because they take a bit of CPU and GPU power, required for post-processing effects rendering.

When Abstractism was up on the store, it was marketed as a “relaxing” platformer with a simple design. But YouTuber SidAlpha noticed that something was afoot, when someone on the Team Fortress 2 forums posted about how the game was tied into an item scam.

SidAlpha [...] discussed how the Steam Marketplace was suddenly populated with items from Abstractism, which closely resembled rare items from other games. For instance, the player on the Team Fortress 2 forums spotted a rare rocket launcher with an identical thumbnail and description as the official TF2 item; it was only upon paying $100 for the rocket that he noticed it was attached to a different game. In addition to the bogus items, which ranged from outright scams to meme and joke items, there were also clear indications of the game’s more malevolent nature.

[...] Just hours after SidAlpha’s video and the associated forum posts began to spread, Valve removed Abstractism from Steam, and the developer has been banned from Steam. All previously purchased Abstractism items have been tagged with “This item can no longer be bought or sold on the Community Market.”

There’s been no official announcement about why Abstractism was removed, but we’ve reached out to Valve for comment and will update as necessary.

Update: Valve responded with this statement about Abstractism’s removal.

We have removed Abstractism and banned its developer from Steam for shipping unauthorized code, trolling, and scamming customers with deceptive in-game items.

Original Submission