Valve apologizes for confusion over event that hurt indie devs

Valve has apologized for an “obscurity” in the instructions of its Steam Grand Prix event that caused players to massively remove cheaper games, mostly indie titles, from their Wishlist.

As part of the so-called Steam Grand Prix event, players can get the game at the top of their Wishlist for free. However, that detail was not communicated clearly, leading players to believe that they would get a random game from their Wishlist for free and thus took cheaper games off their wishlist. This is to maximize profit.

Several indie developers took to Twitter to complain about the practices. The deletions become described as a ‘big blow to take’. In a blog post, Valve therefore now apologizes for the confusing situation. Players will be compensated for these and other confusions, but there has been no response to the publishers and developers who have been harmed.

Players can join a team in the Steam Grand Prix and increase the team’s chances of winning by completing ‘quests’ such as playing a game, writing a review, getting achievements and more. Every day random players of the winning team will receive the game at the top of their Wishlist as a gift.