A number of games, movies and downloadable items were temporarily removed from the Steam store overnight, including Valve’s own title Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
As spotted by Twitter userGabe Followerand recorded onSteam Database, 85 separate store listings were removed from theSteamstore at around 6am GMT (1am ET).
These included a number of games (including Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Section 8: Prejudice and Paws & Claws: Pet Vet), some DLC (including content for Fallout: New Vegas, Batman Arkham City,Street FighterX Tekken and Wolfenstein II), and around 30 movies (including Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Paddington and Halloween 2).
The removals weren’t limited to simply the game titles: asSteam Databasenotes, every element of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was removed, including the store description, the listed categories and all the screenshots and trailers.
csgo page is down on steam?https://t.co/MgFCciyUG5pic.twitter.com/SQjWkl3MvM
CS:GO isn’t just the only app that disappeared from the Steam Store. Something went wrong on Valve’s end there, when they disappeared a few appids showed up in a store api (0, 160, 202) that shouldn’t have.List of affected apps:https://t.co/4nDGgWEtnH
The items were all added back to the store two hours later, and at the time of writing there has been no explanation for the incident.
Due to the seemingly random nature of the items that were removed, it appears the disappearances were accidental.
However, Steam Database founderPavel Djundikspeculated that content removals could be related to geographical locks.
“From a cursory look, a lot of these apps had various region locks,” he wrote. “Perhaps geoip or something related started failing?”
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive remains one of the most popular games on Steam, with around 11 million players per month.
In December 2018,Valvemade the shooter free-to-play, choosing instead to make money from the game’s cosmetic items.
