The game Abstractism on Steam used higher graphics settings options to siphon users' processing power for mining cryptocurrency. It's since been pulled, but it's an indictment of Steam's lack of curation.

https://www.eurogamer.net/amp/2018-07-30-steam-game-abstractism-turns-pcs-into-cryptocurrency-miners

https://motherboard.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/gy3dx7/steam-pulled-game-for-alleged-cryptocurrency-mining-scam-abstractism

Well thank Christ I never got it.

I'm sick of devs doing this the dirty little corporate raiders they are!

These players should be honored that the devs has chosen their own customers to help them mine cryptocurrency because it's better then they deserve for supporting Steam and DRM or atleast that was my thought at first however after thinking it through, Valve should put devs like this in an asshole category and cease business with them immediately.

Between this, Flight Sims Labs distrubiting malware in their games, lawsuits for honest reviews and any other shitty thing under sun that some devs do there need to be someone holding them accountable for their actions and that should be Steam but i doubt anything will happen anytime soon.

Steam seriously need to have quality control. I wonder how many of these "devs" are there doing the same thing.

From the article:

"He learned about the game when a fan reached out to tell him they’d been taken in when they tried to buy a $100 golden rocket launcher for the game Team Fortress 2 via a third party site. Apparently, the scammer had sold them an item for Abstractism that used the same name and art as the golden rocket launcher, but would never work in Team Fortress 2."

I'm not sure what's worse: That fake game developers use Steam to distribute malware/cryptocurrency miners, or the fact that some gamers are willing to spend 100+ dollars on an alternative weapon skin.

Ladies and gentlemen, modern gaming is fucked.

Give It time, no doubt EA, Bethesda, WB, Capcom, Activision, Ubisoft will eventually put this crypto mining in their games

Man, this is bullwark. Where is my malware on GOG? I want honest to goodness DRM free malware, but all I get are a bunch of false positives!

I was thinking the same. There must be other games on Steam doing this. It makes one wonder which ones and how many.

We may be joking about it now, but in the long run I could see them go for this sort of thing, or at least some variation of it. And the sad thing is, many gamers would be OK with it, as long as the publishers dangle some shiny virtual carrot in front of their faces. Maybe they'd use the processing power for something else, not necessarily crypto-mining, and they'd come up with some fancy marketing term for it. And in return, players could unlock some more "rare" character skins, or pointless achievements. Probably just obscure Indie games, at least for now. Still, the lack of quality control on Steam is kinda scary, if that sort of thing can just slip by. What's stopping some troll from inserting even more harmful code into their "game"?

One step to find out is asking how to detect such malware. Usually this is the job of a good antivirus-protection program. How do we know that it's probably just obscure Indie games? Is this more like guessing because there are not more cases known? Also how is Steam supposed to control the quality? They aren't really specialized in detecting malware and using graphics card capabilities is quite usual for games. I guess this kind of thing could easily slip by. In conclusion, there is nothing except your malware/antivirus protection software that the is stopping some troll or someone else inserting more harmful code in their game.

Well, I didn't think Steams "we allow anything" policy would last very long.

GOG curation rulz. Such crap would never be allowed here.

Cool, when is the preorder here then?

So Steam have finally made it the final destination of zero curation; they now sell software actually infected with viruses.

Well, of course it's not very nice. But not as bad as harvesting personal data, which a lot of games on Steam does, and which the news site reporting this does too. ("3rd party advertising cookies")

The DRM on Steam is also pretty dodgy.