Steam Ban 2017: Valve Bans 40,000 Users From Accessing Steam Accounts After Summer Sale

Valve has banned around 40,000 Steam users following the company’s recent Summer Sale promo.

More than 40,000 Steam users can no longer access their accounts starting late last week when Valve Anti-Cheat swung the banhammer against them. Apparently, Valve’s anti-cheat software has identified questionable activity in the user accounts, so the company blocked them last Thursday, July 6. This is the biggest single-day ban that Valve has imposed since last October 12, 2016’s 15,000 bans.

According to Dot Esports, Valve implemented the ban against 40,000 users a day after the company’s 2017 Steam Summer Sale promo ended. Obviously, the promotion helped the system to identify cheaters. Most previously banned users anticipated Steam’s sale to set up new accounts and re-purchase their games at cheap prices. This is said to be what the banned 40,000 users did, so it was easy for the system to identify them for a re-ban.

Valve didn’t stop there however. The company blocked an additional 5,000 on the same day due to in-game bans. This has even led to a loss of $9,600 in relation to the “Counter-Strike:Global Offensive” weapon skins alone. The day after, July 7, Valve Anti-Cheat banned 954 user accounts and the number of bans have been very minimal since, as pointed out by PC Gamer.

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Valve is known to have a very strict policy against cheaters. Its Valve Anti-Cheat System detects questionable activities and implements either a single game ban or an account ban. The latest massive ban is said to be Valve’s way of making a statement about its intent of cracking down the practice of some players that involves stocking up on cheap copies of games and spinning up multiple accounts, as per Polygon.

On Reddit, many users voiced out their thoughts regarding the newest massive single-day ban. Some claim that most of the user accounts that were banned probably belonged to kids. Others point out how cheaters always tend to twist things and make it appear as though they are the victims of Valve’s Anti-Cheat System.

“I truly don’t understand the point of people who spend money to buy multiplayer games only to cheat and rob themselves of the experience, knowing they will also get banned,” user enderandrew42 wrote. Redditor KnifevsFace commented, “Most of those kids are just wasting their parents money anyway so I doubt they even care.” Another user with the handle MysteriousDrD stated, “I think a lot of them are kids and are at the age where they don’t really understand long term consequences.”

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Reddit user sleepinxonxbed opined: “Cheaters will twist things and think the stupidest [thing] to convince that they themselves are the victims instead.” To which Redditor shikiroin responded, “This is exactly what came to mind as well. It’s hilarious and also confusing how these people trick themselves into thinking that just because they paid money for a game, they think they can do whatever they want without consequences.”

What are your thoughts on Valve’s latest massive Steam ban? Tell us what you think in the comments.