Valve eliminated a sport from its Steam online game platform and retailer as a result of it contained malware, in response to media reviews. In its discover to customers who downloaded the sport, Valve stated affected customers could wish to “contemplate totally reformatting your working system.”
The sport was known as PirateFi, and billed itself as “an exhilarating survival sport set in a vibrant, low-poly world the place you possibly can select to play solo or with others in multiplayer mode.” It’s not identified precisely how many individuals downloaded the sport, however its retailer ranking had a 9/10 rating out of 51 opinions, in response to an archived model of its Steam web page seen by information.killnetswitch.
Valve eliminated the sport this week, as reported by PCMag. A put up on Reddit confirmed the message that the corporate despatched to gamers who downloaded the sport.
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Within the discover to customers, Valve stated it had eliminated the affected sport builds from steam, however stated it urged customers to “run a full-system scan utilizing an anti-virus product that you simply belief or use often, and examine your system for sudden or newly put in software program.” Valve stated a full system reset would “be certain that no malicious software program stays in your machine.”
Valve didn’t specify the form of malware discovered within the sport. A spokesperson for Valve didn’t reply to information.killnetswitch’s request for remark.

The Steam app, in addition to video video games themselves, usually have deep entry to players’ units, making malware concentrating on players notably interesting to hackers. Final yr, information.killnetswitch reported that hackers had been concentrating on players with an infostealer malware, a marketing campaign that Activision was investigating. In 2023, hackers had been discovered infecting gamers of an outdated Name of Obligation sport with a self-spreading malware.
Because of what is among the most brazen hacks within the video-gaming world, Digital Arts needed to postpone an Apex Legends esports match after a hacker took management of the players’ computer systems throughout a match to make it appear to be they had been dishonest.