Steam today removed nearly 200 games from its store by banning Silicon Echo Studios (who also does business as Zonitron Productions). These games were cheap "asset flips" intended to turn game assets created by someone else into what barely qualifies as a game, mostly to take advantage of people getting Steam Trading Cards from it.

Basically, the keys are typically given away for free or very low cost. People generate Steam Cards and sell them and the dev gets a cent on each sale. I was a bit saddened by how many of the games I have, mostly thanks to using SteamGifts. If you do have the games in your inventory, you can still download and play them, but they will no longer generate trading cards and you can no longer do anything with any cards, backgrounds or emotes from the game other than trade them or turn them into gems.

Polygon's story: https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/2017/9/26/16368178/steam-shovelware-removed-asset-flipping

The list of removed games: http://steam.madjoki.com/app/659850/related

To be honest i had quit a few from the list but they where really bad games. Hope this is the start for Steam to do something about the massive amount of shovelware they have on the store.

I never thought about the fact that they'd give away thousands of copies in order to make money off the cards, kinda smart, also super sheisty. Glad they're getting a handle on these, even though I also have a bunch of them lol.

Those GooCubelets games are the worst.

Yeah, probably a smart move on their part.

Yeah, I'll just be deleting those from my steam account.

I owned more than 5 of them. I hadn't had them installed besides the first Goocubelets which I now deleted. Don't know why this is happening now, should've been done when the first game released...