Valve announced this afternoon that the poorly-reviewed stealth game Art of Stealth was removed from Steam after it was discovered that its developer forged positive reviews.
Art of Stealth’s developer has been lashing out against negative Steam reviews over the last few days. In fact, if you’ve heard of the game before, it could be because developer Matan Cohen picked a fight with YouTube personality Jim Sterling after he trashed the game in a video, calling it “absolutely terrible rubbish.”
Cohen’s studio fired back that Sterling has “no respect to software engineers who learned programming in university for 5 years and work hard to create a good game.” The Art of Stealth team then filed a DMCA takedown request for Sterling’s video and then, Sterling claims, sent him legal threats.
In a statement, Valve explains that Cohen “appears to have created multiple Steam accounts to post a positive review for their own game,” noting that this is a violation of Steam’s review policy. Very sad. Luckily for legit fans, the game will still be available in their Steam library.