Steam, the famous gaming platform run by Valve Corporation has just pulled from its store a game dubbed “Abstractism” due to evidence that points to a possible cryptojacking.
Abstractism is a simple platformer where players would have to make a pixel jump from one wall to another in a white and black environment. Retailing at just $0.99 (50% off until August 2nd) before it got pulled from the Steam store, it was a very cheap game.
Considering its simplicity and its low price, it’s no wonder that various people have tried it out. That’s when customer complaints about the game’s performance metrics started flowing in.
Sketchy to say the least
The game is developed by Okalu Union in collaboration with dead.team. Subsequent to receiving various complaints, Steam decided to immediately ban both game publishers from its platform. Interestingly enough, Okalu Union still has various games/apps available on Google’s Play Store.
Unlike the dead.team which has a fairly decent website, Okalu Union has minimal online presence, which is another red flag. Further pointing towards a possible cryptojacking is a report from Polygon that states that the game asked its players to keep it on for as long as possible.
According to a report from CCN, when one customer accused the developer of cryptojacking, the company replied in a fairly condescending manner as follows:
“Bitcoin is outdated, we currently use Abstractism to mine only Monero coins.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.”
The game tricked gamers to buy fake copies of rare items
Even worse, some players even noticed that Abstractism started selling game items that resembled rare artifacts for other games. Others, not so lucky, who bought the items discovered that they couldn’t be used in the games they wanted, nor could they be used Abstractism itself.
This is just one example of the many “fake” games that Steam recently removed from its database in the last month.