Steam bug costs company $7,500

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Jason Yarmy, Staff Reporter

There was a bug discovered on the gaming platform Steam on August 16. This bug allowed people to have an unlimited amount of money in their wallets. In turn, people could buy any games they wanted which cost Steam an estimated $10,000. The problem was solved quickly. However, the person who managed to find the problem was paid a total of $7,500 for their help in fixing it. This was still too late as multiple people on Reddit have already received their games and have not been refunded or anything of that sort. People who exploited the bug got to keep the games. However, their virtual wallets have been cleared.

This still caused problems for Steam though. They have now lost money as a reward for a bug that should not exist. Thankfully for them, there was a sale going across a lot of popular games at the time, so it saved them some of their profit, but the developers had it the worst as there was a boom in the popularity of players who hunt for glitches to ruin big title games for other players. Some titles including GTA V have already been having this problem, but it was now introduced into games like Rainbow Six: Siege, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Red Dead Redemption II, and Rust. This has had a significant impact on the gaming community; However, some of it may turn out to be good, helping developers find some new critical bugs to fix. 

It is not often that a glitch or bug this damaging or important is discovered and/or exploited by the community so this leads to more questions like “how many other problems are there that can come out into the public eye and cost even more money at any time?” Nobody knows the answer to that; however, there are still problems starting every day so the community needs to report any action they see that can damage Steam as a whole as soon as possible. Nothing is ever perfect, especially when it comes to computers.