Some wonderful suggestions here, but removing these features would reduce the cash inflow, so I can’t realistically see these things happening any time soon.
Plus, anyone got any idea on how to handle the transition process? Because I don’t. All I can picture is a pit fire.
Totally true, definitely won’t happen…
SidAlpha (Youtuber) actually made a quite apt comparison of those types of shovelware factories with garden weeds…
The weeds start growing, when it gets to a point where it starts to mess with the normal plants, valve sends in the gardener and it’s out of sight, out of mind for a little while. Rinse & repeat.
We saw that with zonitron & sock pupppets associated, arcane raise, next is probably putilin ind, wich is also starting to outgrow lots of plants in valve’s “garden”…
Meh…
i think you are forgetting some key points there
zonitron and the other mass cleansings did not happen because of “valve trimming the weed”
-those happened purely because of the way they violated Valves business ToS, which is probably the only thing Valve gives a tiny fart about
had they not fcked up in those various ways, they would 100% still be around, fake games, cheevo spammer or card mills regardless
it has already been mentioned how this new approach directly mess with “the normal plants”, by how the “confidence metric” works, in that it obscures new+small games, weed or not, because it’s a halfassed catch all method, -the one Valve likes to employ, because it requires the least effort
(the system was in fact so halfassed it targeted dlc, new and old, because the system, ofc can’t register us “playing” dlc, so those metrics didn’t get counted in, and a rush update is already on the way to address that blunder)
Zonitron got kicked out because they were trying (and succeeding) in cheating the store’s algos, wich, to be totally honest is the usual route for those types of “devs”…
They grow, start getting bolder and bolder and eventually end up using store maipulation tactics, fake reviews, the usual MO’s… They all end up doing it.
And btw, i’m not praising this new approach in any way… It’s flawed af, because valve only wants algorythms to do curation for them…
yup, just wanted to make it clear it was not “trimming the weeds” because “good-guy Valve”, but merely because of their own fck ups leading to them getting caught in their flagrant abuse
had they played it cool, like others do, they’d still be around with no problem, -because valve dgaf about them 
Honestly, I am glad that it became harder to get into the steam store, that green light was removed and that these shit games are given the same fate.
You also see it in the discounts that no game will go below 49 eurocents (apart from bundles perhaps). So that card farming suddenly became a lot less interesting.
In green light a lot of these shit games would hand out free keys for upvoting/positive reviewing the game and such. At a certain point for every decent game released at least 9 trash games were released if not more. Trash games where they make the money not on sales, but on card transactions and badges. These cards were then passed on to bots to sell them for CSGO keys or third party sites and tada money. It had to stop. If I happen to lose games because of this, so be it.
Also yes, Valve earns money from these card transactions as well. It was however destroying their entire store and filling it with garbage.
Stay away from my achievements!
just to clear it up, it did not become harder to get on steam post greenlight. It in fact become easier, much, much easier, and the post greenlight surge of games has been insane 
(+now “devs” no longer eve have to put in the effort of greenlight manipulation either and can just throw their “games” up)
this is not (just) because of an attempt to hold back card mills
the 49(US)cents (39€cent) was put in place to cover transaction costs
it had always been a “policy” but apparently wasn’t “on” by default, and not enforced until it became a problem for valve taking a transaction fee cost penalty on all those 9-20cents purchases (with card mill/fake games)
it’s even been a problem for some other countries with real games,
because be default, as standard their prices are lower, and with that new auto system, sometimes when a game then would hit below 49(US)cents converted in their own currency, they’d no longer be able to buy the game/bundle, despite nothing having changed on their end, because local currency was still lower than $, per usual, because of how steam store calculated the policy’s “fixed transaction fee cost”/minimum price from US$ currency standpoint
it “might” have been “discovered” because of fake games, but don’t think it was something valve did to try and be “the good guy” and weed them out. They merely (as usual) just did it to cover their own ass so they didn’t lose money on the super cheap discounts
Oh, is that why Hard Reset Redux kept losing its buy button if you had the loyalty discount during sales? That makes way more sense.
yup, it’s been particular annoying to some, because depending on a “already owned” amount of items in a bundle/discount, you’d lose access to an entire cheap bundle if the content left for grabs didn’t average out to 50cents each 
pretty bummer depending on one’s accumulated discount/products in a given bundle pack
-haven’t checked recently if they’ve changed or fiddled with the “settings” to make this better, (tho i doubt it given the 39€cents “min price” i still see often on cheap games today)
but as late as the december holiday sale, you could still find people miffed about it on X forum where products “suddenly” wasn’t available to them because of the discount amount not falling in line with the “50cent rule” 
It sounds like having “fake achievements” honestly wasn’t hurting anyone, it was just annoying certain people that others were having useless achievements or achievements they believed that person shouldn’t have.
That’s what I’m getting from this at least. Am I misunderstanding this article or what? What’s the big deal if some Steam user wants to deck out his Steam profile like its early 2000s MySpace with hideous, cheap Achievements from loser games?
It’s more of a fact of having bloating of not even games in the Steam store, people who don’t spend any effort on a silly program designed to give people lots of achievements, leading to getting non-suspecting people as well as achievement hunters to purchase/propagate this practice. It’s preying on people’s weaknesses, not really selling games…
“devs” would attach Xthousand achievements to a “game” as a selling point (besides the cards)
thus flooding the store with sometimes identical “games”, “games” one could argue that had no right/reason to exist other than steams 2 arbitrary gimmicks of cards/achievements
the spam of those “games” annoyed/annoy a group of people more than the actual achievements/people getting the achievements -i think only the “achievement purists” are annoyed with that actual achievements
for most people it’s just about them being used to spam the store even more with crappy games so some douche can exploit the system more to get their precious cards/gems/cents running
I will add in my two cents here, @YQMaoski has already covered the impact on valve (which honestly is why valve chose to remove them), now let me try and put forward a hypothesis about how it may hurt others. Please note this is just a hypothesis, made up of 100% speculation, cause what do I know? (Sidenote: I know quite a bit, just not about this particular topic, I have used my understanding of theoretical social change and biological evolution and animal behavior to create this hypothesis)
In general, you are correct there isn’t any impact on others (it is clear cut personal freedom, they can do whatever they want with their games and their steam profile, nobody should be negatively impacted by their actions). However, it does seem to me that it can complicate things when achievements may or may not be used as a form of ‘social currency’ indicating to prospective traders/steam account sales that the account is a ‘trustworthy’ one, or indicate that a person is a true achievement hunter. In this situation, there is effectively “devalued” currency, where someone can flood their social economy with cheap achievements and appear (without due diligence from the those observing the situation) to be in a stronger state than they really are. This again isn’t necessarily going to negatively impact others, but it does seem to necessitate the introduction of some detection system that can distinguish between the “devalued” social currency and the truly valuable, which may bring undue suspicion to a person’s steam account because they own one or more of these games (so the rest of their stats may be in question).
Another important note is again that if this hypothesis is true, it wouldn’t be justification for valve’s removal of the “games” (again @YQMaoski has explained why valve took action).
A great example of this is the creation of accounts here on Chrono.gg, new accounts are often looked at with great suspicion because “time” is our social currency, imagine if someone started selling a cheap (<$5) app that would gather 10 badges and somehow supercharge a processor to create logged time (I am a biologist so this is obviously not possible), where the account would be 1 week old in a few hours. Suddenly, accounts might face more scrutiny, which would be a strong impact on many.
Curses @Gnuffi had a simpler and better explained post while I was writing this!!!