Apologies for the lack of posts of late, as those of you who are in the Discord server will know I went on holiday for a few weeks and only got back a few days ago, but something quite big has happened in the last couple of days and that's concerning an indie game developer called Atomic Fabrik.

For those that don't know Atomic Fabrik is a developer that's been on our radar for a while. I have been meaning to get an article up on them for some time, however due to work conflicts, my holiday and more coming up I never got around to it. However, there doesn't appear to be much of a need anymore, although there is an asterisk there which I will get to because Atomic Fabrik appears to have had most of their titles banned from Steam.

This ocurred yesterday, August 14th when 248 games got banned from Steam[x.com], all of them belonging to Atomic Fabrik. And yes, for those that are curious, that is more games than what Zonitron Productions had at the time of their removal.

For those unaware, Atomic Fabrik was in fact the first ever developer we talked about back when the group was first founded, so I found it werid that 7 years later that has now come full circle. Although, Atomic Fabrik has gotten much worse since our initial article. Back then, I'd only covered them because of some censorship that was happening on one of their game's forums. I highly encourage you to go and watch these two videos by Fireb0rn (thanks for the shoutout FB) and also this discussion thread by Sentinels member Shattered Mind as both he and many other users were compiling alot of information on Atomic Fabrik.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwc9XkuuTGI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRklKoexsbI

In short, Atomic Fabrik has for at least almost a year been partaking in a very dodgey trade deal because they were monetising and setting their games up in a way for their profitability would be outside of Steam. Atomic Fabrik would launch a game, give it a cheap price for a week while he hired services like Obzor to artificially inflate the review score, and then after this was completed he would then raise the price to hundreds of dollars and effectively lock other people out from buying the game on Steam. And this was done so that Atomic Fabrik could then distribute Steam keys to the likes of G2A and then because the game ticked the boxes of it having a high review score and being priced high, G2A would then package keys into their platinum mystery key bundles, hence the scam. Users think they're getting high quality and expensive AAA games and instead they get games like "Fly Fly Tuk Tuk" and "Cowboy Girl".

As I mentioned, Atomic Fabrik had almost 300 games on Steam, and these games were uploaded to over 60 different accounts. Shattered Mind did an exceptional job at documenting these different aliases in his thread on our group, so please do go and give that a read. In some cases, Atomic Fabrik didn't even have a developer or publisher listed on these games though. They would add them on the initial submission but would then edit the store pages to remove them[steamdb.info].

So after almost a year of abusing tools, deceiving customers, manipulating reviews, what was it that seemed to break the camel's back? Well, while we don't have any statement from either Valve or Atomic, it appears to me that the ban was triggered by one game in particular, and that game was "Masterchef Cakes Edition 2". The game started off as one of your usual Atomic Fabrik scams, but on steroids. I got sent the game in an email by another Steamworks developer and there were two major problems with the game's store page.

First of all, the game's store page was entirely comprised of AI artwork and AI screenshots[steamdb.info]. None of the screenshots showed any depiction of the game. Now, this isn't a debate to be had on should or shouldn't AI artwork be used, but rather there was absolutely nothing on the store page to tell a customer what the game looked or played like. This is a direct violation of Steam's rules, as in their Steamworks documentation, it states:

Originally posted by Steam:

Your screenshots must only contain gameplay. This means avoid using concept art, pre-rendered cinematic stills, or images that contain awards, marketing copy, or written product descriptions.

And not only this, but the reviews on the Store page were even more heavily manipulated than usual. Often the reviews would only be at around 20-30 on Atomic Fabrik games, however this game had almost 100 fake reviews, and these comprised the entirety of the store page making it even more obvious than normal.

In addition, this game in particular I had received an email about from another Steamworks developer, and likewise I had also seen other curators outside of the usuals posting about the game, which I think likely saw to an influx of extra reports than usual, and indicated this game was getting more attention than other Atomic Fabrik titles. What's more, it was only the day before Atomic Fabrik got banned that those AI images got added to the store page.

That's the current theory I'm running with, deceptive/fake screenshots which violate Steamworks rules, further carelessness with his fake reviews and this game getting shared around a lot more I felt spelt the demise of Atomic Fabrik.

However, something of note is that not all Atomic Fabrik's games got removed. There are a few that still remain. The majority of the games that remain up are because some apps I'm told by an inside source who used to work with Atomic Fabrik were sold off. Meaning Atomic Fabrik no longer owns the apps, and are instead owned by different publishers. However, there are some games here that this doesn't appear to be the case with.

https://sp.zhabite.com/steamstore/app/1531720/Need_for_Drive__Open_World_Multiplayer_Racing/

https://sp.zhabite.com/steamstore/app/1568180/USA_Truck_Simulator/

https://sp.zhabite.com/steamstore/app/1989180/The_World_of_a_Mermaid/

https://sp.zhabite.com/steamstore/app/2709300/After_War_Town/

This is not a complete list, just a few examples.

I'll be sure to tag all the games on our curator that remain up by Atomic Fabrik and I will be getting in touch with Valve to see if they are aware of these games remaining up. Initially it was believed that they may be doing these in waves, but we're into the next day and no further game bans seem to have been issued.

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UPDATE - 17/08/2024 - So I went ahead and tagged all of the remaining Atomic Fabrik games on our curator, and there is a total of 59 games that Valve did not ban, some of which even still have Atomic Fabrik listed as the developer and publisher.

I have made a curated list of just Atomic Fabrik games on our curator page, you can access the full list here:

https://sp.zhabite.com/steamstore/curator/27507830-Sentinels-of-the-Store/list/130089/

The remainder of the original article follows below

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But that is it for this article, I have also left an open invite out to Atomic Fabrik to do an interview, similar to the one I did with Badim (link below) so I am waiting to see if I get any response back on this, but in the meantime, if there are anymore updates, I'll be sure to give them to you. The next article will be talking about the new changes Steam are making to reviews and store page descriptions, so keep an eye out for that!

I'm also restarting up the Sentinels of the Store Facebook page[www.facebook.com], so do drop a like and follow there if you haven't already, along with following me[x.com] and Sentinels[x.com] on X and joining our Discord server[discord.gg].

Special thanks to our Patrons Nin-Nin, Old_Navy_Twidget & Caff for their continued support. If you want to find out how to support our work, then please do join our Discord and read our #roles channel related to Patrons for all the information!