Steam Bans A Record Number of Accounts After Summer Sale

Steam’s Summer sale sliced prices for an array of fan favorites and hidden gems, but it did more than just give users a great deal. On July 6th the service swung Valve’s Anti-Cheat banhammer on more than 40,000 steam users.

Better known as the VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat), the system began it’s purge just one day after the sale, also dealing hefty damage to cosmetic for games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as well. According to vac-ban.com, the ban resulted in nearly $9,600 being lost for CS:GO weapon skins.

Of those bans, about 30,000 were given before 12 pm ET. Alongside that, another 5,000 in-game bans were doled out on July 6.

To put this all in perspective, on average, VAC bans around about 3,000 to 4,000 bans a day. The largest ban count in one day previously took place on October 12, 2016, as VAC racked up 15,227 bans.

Steam has been cracking down on VAC policies in recent years as they changed it’s gifting policy to help stop cheaters back in August 2016. The new policy required that games with VAC and Game Ban-enabled games be gifted immediately to another Steam user, which served to combat players that worked around VAC and Game Bans

But what do these bans have to do with the Steam sale? In reality, it has to do with a previously banned user attempting to create another account. Creating a new account isn’t at all difficult and with the Summer sale, there is no cheaper way to back onto a game that you were banned for cheating on previously without having to pay full retail price.

Steam’s preventive actions are setting a precedent for how they treat user trying to game the system and they don’t seem like they will let up anytime soon. While it’s not to the extreme of the previous day, 954 VAC bans were handed out the day after, so cheaters beware.