Dirty Devs: Dexion Games and their asset flips

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SidAlpha Web links:

[JakeN]

Changing the name of Game of Life would be like changing the name of Tetris. It's a legitimately iconic piece of computer science, mathematics, and ecology history. It's a bit amusing that this was an asset flip of an asset flip. Game of Life's pseudocode is well known and open source, and has many free binary forms around. It's often tweaked and combined with Perlin Noise Generators for the purposes of terrain generation, like in Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft. It's still disappointing that someone is monetizing it in the Unity Asset store, but I guess it's the equivilant of Shenzhen knockoffs of Arduinos. Completely unavoidable.

[JonTheGeek]

YouTube overstep and kills channels

Steam understeps and becomes an anarchy.

It's like these two are brother and sister.

[twilightparallax]

Sid, friendly advice here: your email should be more to the point. Be specific. Introductions should be kept to a minimum. Start off with denouncing Dexion Games and then segway to broader concepts if you must. Get your ideas across first and then relay your work/credentials.
Encouraging the use of email templates dilutes your message in the long run as emails are likely to fall into the spam filter's net.
Might help if you get more involved in your steam curator's page as Valve monitors these more frequently.
Best of luck.

[firedingo]

At minimum I wish there was an option for people who come across these games to flag them and they're automatically shot to the top of the list for human review. It might also be helpful if people could flag accounts so if an asset flipper for example received enough flags against their account then the next time they tried to upload something it would have to pass a human review. No algorithm is ever going to be quite as good as humans and I think Valve should keep trying to find the right algorithm(s) that they want but in the short term the best thing they could do is add a bit of human oversight.
The easy solution here is to outsource some of the work to the community but the system supporting the community has to be right in the first place otherwise the community won't be helpful in anyway.
Unfortunately Valve tend to be slow to react unless it's going to negatively blow back on them, then they're speedy enough.

[ctothorp]

You know what makes me sad about this series. I can see it going on for a long, LONG time. Keep it up and maybe one day we can see the end of the "dirty devs" series or at least their infestation on steam.

[Geoff]

And they couldn't even be arsed to get rid of the mouse cursor.

[JohnDoe-xhwp]

Sid look up a game on Steam called Lock Passing then look at its $200 DLC. That show's how much Valve cares about its store.

[phprofYT]

Sid, you put more effort into decided on "7' than they put in making all 29 games.

[mjc]

If anything comes from this, it'll be Steam getting even worse. Valve brought in Jim Sterling and TotalBiscuit and all that happened is Greenlight got canned in favor of Direct, which made things absolutely worse. Seems like all Valve does if they talk to someone is show off their upcoming terrible ideas and nothing more.
(and no, not Jim or TB's fault, 100% Valve's fault)

[ItsNotFilia]

Haven't Totalbiscuit and Jim Sterling already done that (i.e. talk directly with Valve staff about this stuff, back before Steam Direct went live)? I'm willing to assume Valve are all too aware of all this.
Frankly, the way I see this, the best (and likely only) way to get results (in the sense that Valve would actually start actively curating their own store for a change, or do anything that would actually yield more appeal and good rep to their store front) is for legit devs to simply publish on other store fronts with better policies, instead and thus gradually make those other store fronts the de facto go-to place, when you want good games. It's only when legit devs deem Steam too high a risk to invest in, that Valve will ever be truly pressured into taking definitive action against what is essentially an affront even to shovel-ware.

[driftercarbon]

I really do hope that the efforts of everyone trying to fight against the spread of the plague of asset flippers makes an impact in the long run. I realize this is a situation where for the most part all anyone can really hope to do is take down one abuser at a time, but even that can really add up over time.

[kotarai_]

Good to see you are still taking a bat to those asset flippers, Sid!

[AgrimarYT]

Hey SidAlpha,
There's a game made by 'Outpost Games, Inc' called "SOS",
and I'm seeing many reviews of people saying that's "Stream-To-Win",
I think you should check it out and see what these guys are up to.

[oliver_twistor]

Since real developers only have time to publish up to a few titles, can't Steam have that $100 entry fee be per game instead of per account? Steam should really be flagging those accounts who upload 20+ games per account, because no real developer is able to create 20+ real games, unless they are a team of a hundred people, but then they would probably develop much bigger games and thereby not being able to make 20+ games anyway.

[onjaimusic]

Well, the term "bad actors" sure has taken off.

[asherael]

Game of life is just called game of life. It would be more outrageous if they changed the title. it's ancient, and belongs on every platform. I think it's public domain?

[kelp]

You're a soldier Sid, I can't imagine these creeps getting away with this forever.

[elin]

Valve says they want to get rid of fake games but looking at how little effort they put towards actually getting rid of them and how they ONLY ban bad actors AFTER others call them out or they get Valve into legal trouble makes it clear that Valve wants those fake games because it makes them money.

[Dhalin]

If they would just get rid of the stupid trading cards... I mean really now, if it weren't for the trading cards, then this junk would not be happening, at all.

[capthavic]

The only thing that will motivate Valve to act is a threat to their profits.