https://store.steampowered.com/app/3203860/Sewing_Stuff/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3204440/The_Cube_of_Love/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3211510/Falling_Cube/

UPDATE - Credit to Steam user Shattered Mind who in our forums shared some more titles that they suspected to be associated to Atomic Fabrik. While I haven't been able to 100% verify them all, I have managed to confirm one of the games, Falling Cube, which has been released under the developer name Goritta Klaus does indeed belong to Atomic Fabrik, as the App Info folder includes the Martha B alias discussed here.

The Imgur album has been updated to show this extra connection.

Original article below.

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So, first of all, a massive thank you to Steam user Gelweo in our group who gave me the first indication of this happening. While it may not be the game(s) affected that they claimed, it set me off on the right tracks to prove what was initially a suspicion to be true. Long story short is that Atomic Fabrik, a notable shovelware developer who got banned from Steam a couple months ago and wrote a very colourful X post about our group blaming us heavily for his own self-conceived downfall has in fact returned to Steam after his ban.

Steam banned Atomic Fabrik because they violated a number of Steam Terms of Service rules, varying from review manipulation, failure to disclose AI generated content and just general intent to deceive consumers and resort to more unscrupulous and deceiving practices involving Jee Two Ayy to distribute their games. However, Atomic Fabrik appear to be circumventing their ban and are still actively distributing games onto Steam.

Now, the degree of this happening, I am unsure. As mentioned, Steam user Gelweo got me off on the right tracks with linking me to the game Fog Racing Circuit, which is an asset flip that follows quite a similar scheme to that of Atomic Fabrik, including the fact it's an asset flip, has an AI generated description, has AI generated artwork and also has review manipulation happening. However, there's yet enought to tie this game and it's developer Squadroni Cacciatori to Atomic Fabrik in a 100% manner for now. However, what I can share is there is enough evidence I feel to tie Atomic Fabrik to another Steam developer, Martha B.

Martha B, like Squadroni Cacciatori has AI generated artwork, a limited disclosure of this, and review manipulation to boot on their two titles.

What makes me so confident to say that Martha B is Atomic Fabrik you may ask? Well, I took a bullet for the sake of this group, Steam and also of investigative journalism on Steam and I bought the two games Martha B has made, and found that within the game files of Sewing Stuff and The Cube of Love, there was a file called "App.Info". And within this file, present in both games, you can find Atomic Fabrik's name listed hook line and center[imgur.com].

What is the purpose behind the App.Info file you may ask? Well, a while ago, me and the Sentinels moderator Occular Malice[x.com] were having a look into a similar query and we connected the developer association through this exact same way, the app.info folder. Basically, Occular, who is a game developer himself, explained to me, that the name listed within the App Info folder is the name of the user account who created the app. I.e. the account that the game that you're playing is bonded towards in the Unity engine.

Now, I know we've discussed previously in this group that Atomic Fabrik was notorious for selling his apps off to other people, however, in this case, the fact the developer names are empty besides from the games that have Atomic Fabrik listed in the files and that they surfaced after Atomic Fabrik was booted from Steam, leads me to believe this is simply Atomic Fabrik operating under a brand new account.

I will be writing to Valve about this, there are some other accounts that Atomic Fabrik is suspected to be operating under, however, I feel I have enough to at least compare notes with Valve about, but I don't wish to make any damming 100% accusations like with the Martha B account, so I'd rather send those off privately than risking both my reputation as providing accurate information, and also risking any repercussions for providing false information that I even have a 5% feeling it may be incorrect.

Please do share this and make people aware. We've been quite lucky to catch this quite early on, as Martha B only has 2 games listed on Steam at the moment. Scammers like Atomic Fabrik shouldn't be allowed a second chance in my view. They have shown a clear discontent to consumers and are clearly only involved in this for self gain. Information is power, so share this far and wide.

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https://store.steampowered.com/app/25000/Overgrowth/

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/593110/view/4696781406111167991

On September 27th, Steam announced new changes to the Steam Subscriber Agreement, and I got some requests to go over what these changes are, why they came about and what impact it has on Steam users, so let's get into it.

For a little background, Steam have been in this dispute for the last few years (since April 2021 to be exact) with indie developer Wolfire Games. Wolfire Games for those who don't know are the creators of the popular Steam game Overgrowth, and they're also members of Sentinels of the Store, so hello Wolfire Games if you're reading this!

Wolfire Games filed an antitrust lawsuit against Steam which Wolfire Games talk about more in their blog post[blog.wolfire.com] from May 2021, alleging Valve of using its position to exploit publishers and consumers. They attack Valve's large cut of revenue they get per game sale of 30%. They also claimed that Valve was using Steam to create a monopoly on PC game distribution, and claimed Valve threatened to remove Wolfire Games' games from Steam if the developers charged lower prices on competing storefronts, even if these storefronts charged a different cut of sales revenue compared to Steam.

The original lawsuit was dismissed in November 2021, but Wolfire Games filed an amended complaint in May 2022, and this new amended complaint included allegations that Valve used its monopoly power to impose punitive restrictions on publishers.

If you're interested in the more ins and outs of the lawsuit, feel free to read up on that in these articles:

• Gabe Newell ordered to make in-person deposition for Valve v. Wolfire Games lawsuit[www.gamesindustry.biz]
  
• Wolfire Games founder: 'I had no choice' but to file Steam antitrust lawsuit against Valve[www.gamedeveloper.com]
  
• Judge brings dismissed Steam antitrust lawsuit back from the dead[arstechnica.com]

Well, this lawsuit just had a very interesting development, which has had consequential action that affects most Steam users if you live outside the UK or EU. While it's a noteworthy change, it isn't technically anything new, as if you want what's happened in a nutshell, basically users are having their subscriber agreements updated to the European terms, and here's why.

Essentially what Valve have done to their subscriber agreement is they have removed any mention of an arbitration agreement and class action waivers. For you non-legal people in the room such as me that had to look up what this was, an arbitration agreement is a clause in a contract which means that you agree to settle any disagreements out of court. A class action waiver is a clause that prevents one or both parties from filing a class action lawsuit against the other, effectively protecting companies from larger and more expensive lawsuits.

Well, in some recent filings in the lawsuit[x.com], Wolfire Games brought both of these clauses into question, arguing that they weren't enforeable. In the lawsuit, section 30 and 31 it's stated:

Originally posted by Lawsuit:

Consumers in the Wolfire action contested the enforceability of the arbitration provision but the Court ruled that the threshold issue of arbitration was delegated to, and needed to be resolved in, arbitration. The Court accordingly granted Valve's motion to compel arbitration.[...]

Plaintiffs to this class action complaint were not named plaintiffs in the Wolfire action. They retained seperate counsel and asserted individual claims in arbitration challenging the enforceability of Valve's arbitration provision. Each prevailed, obtaining rulings that the arbitration provision was unenforceable, either for lack of notice, or because it purports to preclude public injunctive relief in violation of the McGill rule (McGill v. Citibank, N.A., 393 P.3d 85, 90-92 (Cal.2017)), or both. The arbitrator thus granted each Plaintiff's motion to dismiss the arbitration.

The updated agreement now required all claims and disputes to proceed in court and not in arbitration. If you're living outside the UK and EU, the agreement now reads:

Originally posted by Steam Subscriber Agreement:

You and Valve agree that all disputes and claims between you and Valve (including any dispute or claim that arose before the existence of this or any prior agreement) shall be commenced and maintained exclusively in any state or federal court located in King County, Washington, having subject matter jurisdiction.

In terms of my take aways from this, I do have some mixed thoughts.

One one side, without the class action waiver, consumers have regained the ability to participate in class action lawsuits. These allow the banding together of consumers and it can be particularly beneficial in widespread issues, such as breaches of consumer rights, defective products and unfair practices. It also allows for more public accountability, arbitration often takes place behind closed doors and doesn't set a public precedent. And it overall does give more leverage to consumers when addressing grievances.

However, on the flip side of that, traditional court cases, can take years to resolve. Arbitration does tend to be faster and more efficient in settling disputes so this move does have that potential to delay resolutions being made.

But overall, I would say it's a positive thing, with some drawbacks admittedly, but I hope this has been a helpful breakdown of these changes as some of you did seem at least curious about what these changes were and why Valve out of all times decided now was the time to put this in. I did also read some other theories on PC gamer and Eurogamer why this was brought in, but I still do think the ongoing Wolfire Games lawsuit is the most likely reason behind this.

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Special thanks go to our Patrons, Stefan, Luke and Nin-Nin. If you want to become a Patron today, join our Discord and find out how to get involved there!

We also held our first ever game night in the Discord server where we got together and played Among Us, so do join us if you want to play games with us all, we're going to try and make it a regular thing.

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Hey all! 2 Sentinels articles in 1 week, how lucky, right? It's not even Christmas.

This one is slightly different through, as the article isn't actually here on the group, but instead, I was approached by a new website by the name of GBAMFS (Gaming Brethren Advocates - Mutual Aid Federation & Society) and asked if I'd be interested in doing a guest article. I thought, why the hell not, sure! So I decided to write up piece about the Steam curating system, which you can go and read on their website here[gbamfs.wixsite.com]

If you want to give these guys a startup boost, they will appreciate it, they're just starting out but have high aspirations on wanting to make meaningful change in the games industry and build a community of writers, content creators and gamers. They have a YouTube channel, Twitch channel, upcoming events, and more, all of which you can find on their link tree here.[linktr.ee]

Thanks again to GBAMFS for hosting our new article.

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Special thanks to our Patrons Old_Navy_Twidget, GreyGore and Caff. If you want to become a Patron today you can find the link in our Discord server.

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https://store.steampowered.com/app/2230980/Caribbean_Legend/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/687800/Heads_Will_Roll_Reforged/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2709300/After_War_Town/

Hey hey! Long time no speak! Very sorry for the lack of posts in the last couple of weeks, I've been very inundated with work, but I've finally found some time today to report on some findings I've been wanting to discuss for a little while now.

Today I wanted to revisit our old buddy Atomic Fabrik, and specifically, I'm actually wanting to do a callback to a point I raised in a previous article where I responded to Atomic Fabrik's post talking about his Steam ban. For those of you unfamiliar or new, a little background first though. Atomic Fabrik was a Steam developer/publisher that pushed out a lot of shovelware titles, but who also partook in review manipulation, deceptive marketting such as using entirely AI generated images on store pages without any gameplay, and also having a tendancy to try and remove his name from titles to prevent association and conceal how many games he was posting to Steam.

So, on August 16th we posted an article responding to some of the points of Atomic Fabrik's post regarding his ban, mainly because he talks about this group a lot in his since deleted X post, but also because there was a lot misinformation that failed to set the record straight. Now, usually when it comes to banned developers, I let them be and move on, they're not on Steam so they're not really contributing to the problems on Steam that we try and address anymore, however, since that article, I've been delving a bit deeper into some other apps that some users reported to me on our forums that they cited were still owned by Atomic Fabrik but were still on the store despite his ban. Now, I was aware of some apps that were still up on Steam by Atomic Fabrik and I even talked about those in the article on August 16th, however the forum quickly collated a lengthy list of games that were still on Steam and it was in the 50's. Granted this was out of a game count that was nearing the 300's, but it did make me question how Valve missed so many. Some of the users cited the developer associations had been removed, some were under different names citing changes in SteamDB log entries, but even then, Valve have access to a lot more information such as banking information that they use when issuing out bans. So what happened with this?

That's what I sought to try and figure out, and the results have offered some answers to at least the initial questions, but have further fueled some confusion and raised more questions from at least the close circle of people, including myself, that have been looking into this.


I'd like to now segue a bit and discuss something that I have been aware of happening on Steam for some time, but I've never had an appropriate time to discuss it publicly, and that's with regards to app acquisitions. An app acquisition is effectively a buyout of games on Steam, transferring the ownership of a Steam app and the Steamworks access to the game from one developer partner to another. And this is surprisingly more common than you think, as this actively goes on in these asset flipping circles, and it seems to be what was at least part of Atomic Fabrik's business model where they sold on some of their apps that they originally owned. It's such a common practice, Steam even have an entry in their Steamworks documentation about transferring applications. So before you ask, no, it's not against Steam TOS to transfer app ownership.

The complicated part about app acquisitions is it makes differentiating when a developer is just renaming themselves for the sake of disassociating themselves from their games or messing with Steam tools etc. vs. a developer genuinely buying a game out very difficult.

However, I am quite confident in saying that in particular with the previously cited 50 or so apps of Atomic Fabrik that these, while they originally were developed by Atomic Fabrik, have since been sold off to other developer partners. Allow me to showcase my rationale for this.


So, with that prior knowledge now conveyed, as I was sending this list to Valve, I did decide to disclose that I am aware that just because a developer's name has changed in SteamDB logs doesn't necessarily equate to the developer has changed their alias, but it could mean that another Steamworks partner has bought the game off the developer off-site or in a private deal.

I then got a response from Valve, and they reiterated this and confirmed that this is very much something that happens. While they didn't confirm nor deny that this was what had been happening in the instance of Atomic Fabrik, they reiterated that it was a correct assurance that just because there had been a name change, it didn't mean the developer was trying to hide their involvement in the title.

Following this email exchange, there was a small ban wave[x.com] that happened, and included was seven of the games that I had sent over to Steam, indicating to me that these apps had been manually reviewed by Valve and they had come to the conclusion that enough Atomic Fabrik ties remained. However, the other 53 remained untouched and available for sale.

Now, to me, my take aways from that were:

• Valve confirmed that app acquisitions and transfers do happen
  
• Valve didn't ignore the list I sent and did still decide to ban a handful of those titles.
  
• It was a conscious decision not to ban those 53 titles - as previously established with Valve cherry picking just the seven specifically. This was neither "these have escaped the net" nor was it negligence on Valve's part.

Just the fact that app acquisitions as a topic was rebounded back to me from the Steam representative, while not fully confirming, I feel heavily implies that this is what's been happening, and that Atomic Fabrik was selling his games off to other developers on Steam in some private deals. And there is further information I've found on some of the Steam pages I got linked which seems to confirm that to me, Atomic Fabrik had been doing dealings with Steam publishers Conglomerate 5, and the publisher who will be the main subject for the remainder of our article: Valkyrie Initiative


Just using the Steam titles at the top of this article, I'm going to take you through a paper trail that I followed with After War Town. After War Town currently only lists publisher Former glory studio, but this was their sole game on Steam.

Navigating to After War Town's discussion forums and to the events and announcements tab, you can see there's only one news post there promoting a game called Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2139840/Skelethrone_The_Chronicles_of_Ericona/

This is a game published by Valkyrie Intiaitve. Now, a lot of users on our forums have noticed this on a few apps but were unsure why this was happening. Unfortunately, Steam removed the author names on News and announcement posts a few updates ago. However, the workaround is if you visit the discussion in particular, you can hit the reply button and quoting the user's text reveals the news post was written by a Steam user known as "coffeemean"

Who is coffeemean you may ask? A quick visit to their Steam profile shows Valkyrie Initiative listed as their primary group. Granted, they don't appear to have any admin privileges there, but they are the ones posting game promos in news feeds not just on some older Atomic Fabrik titles, but also on Valkyrie Initiative games, or well "valkyrieinitiative" games.

Now, you can only post news announcements if you have Steamworks access, and then with that, I think we get a much clearer picture as to what has happened here, and it appears that Atomic Fabrik, before they were banned made a deal with Valkyrie Initiative for them to acquire some of Atomic Fabrik's apps, and that the reason those 30 or so apps weren't banned is because Atomic Fabrik is no longer the owner (I have discounted 20 as we have found they may be with somebody unassociated with Valkyrie Initiative, but that's a story for another time), but are instead owned by Valkyrie Initiative, even though this ownership is not appropriately disclosed on the store page.

But it doesn't stop there, this was the start of the rabbit hole. What if I were to tell you, even though Valkyrie Initiative, according to their store page, only supposedly owning 31 games, were in fact in ownership of almost 400 games?

It's not just Atomic Fabrik titles that Valkyrie Initiative have been buying out, but they also seem to have acquired the entirety of the Conglomerate 5 publisher's catalogue, as well as all bar 4 of the Terro Lunka catalogue.

Again, without changing the names on Steam. This is only shown by news announcements posted by the Valkyrie Initiative representative promoting Valkyrie Inititative games, and you can find these on literally all of the nearly 200 Conglomerate 5 titles, and the vast majority of Terro Lunka games.

The Conglomerate 5 publisher account has not had a new game release since September 2023, with their last release being Journey to Alien Worlds. Do you want to know when Valkyrie Initiative titles started to be cross promoted on Conglomerate 5 games? October 2023, one month after their last game release.

With Tero Lunkka, this appears to be very recent, having just occurred last month. What's important to note and also very key to showing you this is very much indeed an app acquisition is if we compare Terro Lunka's game developer homepage against the search query for their developer name.

You can see that on the homepage, it only lists 4 games, but on the query, it lists 106. Why's there such a wide difference? Well, in the aforementioned Steamworks documentation listing, in the FAQ section, it reads:

Originally posted by Steamworks:

Q. What happens to a game appearing on a Developer or Publisher Homepage when it's been transferred (aka Creator Home pages )?
A. When a transfer is initiated for an appID, the appID will automatically be removed from all Developer or Publisher Homepages that it is currently listed on. Once the transfer is complete, the appID can be listed on the new Developer/Publisher Homepage.

So...Steam automatically remove games from the developer homepages when an app transfer has occurred, but the new homepages need to be assigned manually, which clearly hasn't been done. If you visit the 4 games on Tero Lunkka's homepage, none of them have any ads for Valkyrie Initiative. The only ones that do, are the ones that aren't listed on the homepage. In other words, the one that have been acquired.

Now, in addition, I will also say I received a tip off from a user back in May this year, who claimed to be an insider of Valkyrie Initiative, and they said they weren't able to share all the details, but they stated that Valkyrie Initiative had a scheme at the time to profit off of fake games without tarnishing their brand reputation or flooding their library with bad games. At the time I first received that, I couldn't quite work out what the user was referring to, but with me bearing that in mind and then discovering this just this month, it further fuels the suspicions of this scheme, and adds yet another layer.

Please do, share this article. It's important that this gets known. Valkyrie Initiative are acquiring apps and chosen not to list themselves as the owners, for what appears to be the motivation of to further monetise their scheme while not tarnishing their company's reputation and the seemingly "good" games they list on their main homepage. They are also actively manipulating reviews and deceiving the consumer, as showcased by the Games with Paid Reviews curator. This practice needs to be called out and exposed to the wider community, this publisher is in ownership of almost 400 apps and is only disclosing their involvement with around 30, and review manipulation is shown to be a consistency across all of their titles. Consumers need to know who they're buying games off, and Valkyrie Initiative are showing outright contempt for this.

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Special thanks to our Patrons Stefan, Luke and Nin-Nin. If you want to become a Patron today you can find the link in our Discord server.

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https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/4578559379959234051

First of all, apologies that this may be a little shorter than usual. I have a lot of work this week but I still wanted to get an article up this week anyway, so here we are!

Two weeks ago, we spoke about some planned changes Steam were implementing with regards to the store page written descriptions. You can find the article we did on that here. In short, the announcement was mostly welcomed, with one exception, and that was the announcement Steam made in that they were going to stop allowing developers to promote their other titles on store page announcements and in the game description amongst other areas. Basically if you were an indie developer and you had 3 games and you wanted to maybe promote an upcoming release in your description or in the announcements to try and push more traffic to it, this was going to do a number on you. Many indie developers reported that those tactics generate a large volume of traffic and as a result, were very concerned to hear that this change was coming in.

Fast forward August 29th (I'm a bit late to this too!) and Steam appears to have listened to those criticisms, as they made a new announcement on Steamworks entitled "New options for featuring related content on your store page". In it, they address that they heard and understood the criticism coming mainly from developers with regards to announcement and description promotion. Steam however said they weren't going to walk back on it as they wanted to find a good balance for users being able to find relevant information about the games they were viewing without being bombarded with other games, while still allowing developers freedom to promote their games. Steam have addressed this by rolling out a couple of new additions to store pages.

First of all, they're adding a panel to the store page which directly promotes games from the developer, as exemplified here. This area does not feature the DLC from developers, however, that brings us on to the second change that Steam announced.

Second of all, they are now also rolling out an option for developers to feature their DLC to make it clearer to players what the newest DLC release is, or those that are on a sale.

Overall, the response to this change seems very positive. While the first new widget isn't as prevalent as it gets pushed to between the description and the reviews, developers have still seemingly all welcomed the change. Users have also welcomed this change as well and many people in our Discord were even saying that it's one of the best changes that Steam's ever done. And it all came from taking on feedback from the community and listening, so hats off to Steam from me.

Do let me know what you think of this change in the comments. Again, apologies for the short length, but I am strapped for time this week and I just wanted to get something up quick and this was a very convenient topic and a good means to highlight Steam listening to feedback.

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Special thanks to our Patrons Old_Navy_Twidget, GreyGore and Caff. If you want to become a Patron today you can find the link in our Discord server.

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