Steam game Abstractism accused of hijacking PCs to mine crypto

TITLE PULLED FROM VALVE’S PLATFORM IN RESPONSE.

WHILE VALVE HAS been called-out recently for having loose morals with regards to the content it allows to be sold on its platform (see issue 79), it did not leave time for questions when it removed the game Abstractism from its store. Despite the fact the game itself claimed to be a “relaxing” platformer, YouTuber SidAlpha spotted some peculiarities with its microtransactions, some of which belonged to different games or were entirely fake items altogether.

After other users mentioned spotting issues with the game, including a Malwarebytes scan which flagged one of the executables as a threat, the developer of the game claimed that those “applications are gaming launchers”.

However, when one user said that Abstractism was using gamers’ computers to mine Bitcoin due to its heavy CPU and GPU power requirements, the devs — perhaps in a moment of madness — posted in response that “Bitcoin is outdated” and that they “currently use Abstractism to mine only Monero coins”. Then perhaps realising what they had just said, they added, “Abstractism does not mine any of cryptocurrency” and claimed that the user was simply playing on a high graphics setting.

Valve, like these gamers, were not fooled, resulting in the title being pulled from Steam and the developer banned.