Steam Yanks Game From Marketplace Over Crypto Mining Allegations

Video game marketplace Steam removed an alleged crypto miner from its platform Monday amid user complaints, Motherboard reported.

Steam's parent company, Valve, booted Abstracticism from Steam for hijacking gamers' processing power to mine cryptocurrencies. The company further banned publisher dead.team and developer Okalo Union from the platform going forward.

The game also reportedly tried to scam its users by creating fake items for them to purchase or sell on grey market websites for profit, according to the report.

"We have removed Abstractism and banned its developer from Steam for shipping unauthorized code, trolling with content, and scamming customers with deceptive in-game items," the company said in a statement.

Abstracticism's reported mining was called by a member of the Steam community, who warned that the game was a miner on July 29. The comment was posted as a review by user bobst3r.

YouTuber SidAlpha detailed how the game mined cryptocurrencies in detail in a video as well, prior to its removal.

In a game update posted July 23, Okalo Union claimed that the game was not mining bitcoin or monero, saying that two resource-intensive services run by the game "are required to connect to the Steam [sic] and grant items to your inventory."

Steam image via Casimiro PT / Shutterstock