The “bitcoin plow” game was mercilessly removed from Steam

After the investigation, Steam game conclusion Abstractism took advantage of players’ CPU resources to stealthily run cryptocurrency mining, while also intentionally selling items that looked like items from popular games like Team Fortress 2 (TF2).
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A week before disappearing from the system, many reports were sent by gamers with suspicions targeting the game Abstractism and its developer – Okalo Union. Representatives of Valve says “removed” Abstractism and put a ban on its developer, across the Steam system. The reason is illegal transcoding, false content, and defrauding customers with in-game items.”

Among the publishers affected, “dead.team” also disappeared from the Steam system, but the company’s history is still alive through SteamSpy. Previously, “dead.team” released a game called “dead_file.exe”, a horizontal screen adventure game from developer Saddleship. The entire game, along with Saddleship, has also been removed from Steam.

About the case of Abstractism, gamer SidAlpha has made a thorough analysis video on Youtube to point out each wrongdoing. The case shown is an item that looks exactly like Rocket Launcher’s rare item TF2, including avatars and attribute descriptions. However, there is a small icon that shows it is the product of Abstractism but not TF2.
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Gamer SidAlpha also explained the developer’s process of hiding his whereabouts. Accordingly, the details of Abstractism There is still a URL that links to the game, but the item has no effect other than annoying those caught in the trap.

Mining point cryptocurrency (crypto) is hidden in a file called “steamservice.exe”, which was added to the game via the July 23 update, but reports of unexpected CPU consumption have appeared before this point. On the same day, the developer announced the release of a free item drop event, but with a questionable condition: That is, the item drop process is linked to real playtime, the player receives items are more precious when playing time is longer. So gamers will have to open Abstractism Play continuously for more item drop timers, reset every Friday.

As such, gamers are enticed to run the game for a long time, at a particular time. Both factors show signs of crypto mining.

In a nutshell, Okalo Union’s announcement about the “steamservice.exe” file being used to run the item drop process in Abstractism is completely fabricated, similar to the explanation that CPU takes a lot of resources because the game has “high quality graphics settings”. In fact, the graphic quality of Abstractism is as simple as a potato. Then there was a comment that revealed that the developer “only uses Abstractism to mine Monero coin”.

History of Abstractism shows that the game was released on Steam starting March 15. It’s not clear whether cryptocurrency mining started right after release, but this has once again raised concerns about Steam’s content management process.​