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Verified Steam game steals streamer's cancer treatment donations (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
submitted 1 year ago* by to c/gaming@lemmy.zip
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A gamer seeking financial support for cancer treatment lost $32,000 after downloading from Steam a verified game named Block Blasters that drained his cryptocurrency wallet.

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[–] 30 points 1 year ago* (7 children)

Okay, so the situation majorly sucks and I hope the victim can somehow reclaim that money.

That said, the headline and article repeatedly call it a ‘verified Steam game’ but at no point do they explain what that means.

As far as I know, the only verification scheme on Steam is Steam Deck Verified, but the screenshot of the offending game’s store page shows that it was rated as ‘Unknown’.

Do they mean verified as in ‘Valve approved it for release’? Surely not, because every Steam game is approved for release so ‘verified Steam game’ would be a tautology.

Either I’m missing something, or this source is just adding meaningless words for no good reason.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 1 year ago* (5 children)

    Each game on Steam goes through their approval process. Especially:

    Before your store page or game build can go live, there is a brief review process where we run your game, look at your store page, and check that it is configured correctly and running as expected and not doing anything harmful. This takes between 1-5 days.

    https://partner.steamgames.com/steamdirect

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

    Right, so there’s no such thing as an unverified Steam game because every game has to be approved before it appears on the storefront.

    So why does the article repeatedly bother to specify that this was a ‘verified Steam game’? By that metric, they’re all verified.

    I’m not even mad about it, I’m just confused why they bothered adding the qualifier at all.

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It's mentioned twice by the article. And the term is probably used because that how the gamer addressed it in their post. I can only speculate, I didn't write the article.

    In any case, it's a huge fuck up by Valve and not for the first time.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    it's a huge fuck up by Valve

    Agreed! I’m kind of surprised they don’t automatically scan updates for malware. Or maybe they do but this slipped under the radar somehow? Either way the system clearly isn’t working.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago*

    I was thinking it was the Deck compatibility or just the fact it was on the store front, as if there is some kind of vetting process to sell your game on it. AFAIK, you just need to agree to their terms and pay ~$100. If there is a review process, it probably just makes sure the game runs at all and isn't immediately obviously a scam.

    Because there are hella scam games on Steam.

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