Valve's Banhammer Hits 40,000 Accounts After Steam Summer Sale

The annual Steam sales in winter and summer are events that a lot of PC gamers look forward to, but what if you woke up the day after the sale to discover that your Steam account has been VAC banned? That was the reality for more than 40,000 Steam users on July 6 – just one day after the Summer Sale ended. That, in case you were wondering, is a lot of VAC bans for a single day.

"What," you maybe be wondering, "is a VAC ban?" It's a legitimate question, especially if you're not one to cheat in the games you play. "VAC" stands for "Valve Anti-Cheat" – essentially, VAC is Valve's in-house method of detecting cheats installed on machines that are accessing its servers.

Valve offers VAC-protected servers for a lot of multiplayer games sold through its platform. In fact, a quick search through Steam's catalog shows that 501 games use VAC servers in some capacity. The punishments for triggering VAC are generally pretty severe – get banned in one game and you lose access to all VAC-protected servers across Steam. VAC bans are also permanent and non-negotiable, so if Valve swings its banhammer in your direction, you can pretty much say goodbye to playing multiplayer games in a lot of popular titles.

SteamDB shows that Valve performed 40,434 VAC bans on July 6, which is a pretty major spike when you consider that in the days leading up the purge, the average number of VAC bans per day hovered around 3,000 or 4,000. So what's the deal? Why did Valve ban so many accounts in a single day?

Perhaps the most likely reason lies with the sale itself. With popular multiplayer games on sale across the board, some of those who have previously been VAC banned likely created new Steam accounts to re-purchase games on the cheap. That's just one possibility, and it's unlikely that Valve is going make any statement about this massive wave of bans.

One thing is certain, though: trying to use cheats on VAC-protected servers is a dumb idea, and that's doubly true if your Steam account has a lot of games in its library. If you're going to cheat – and really you shouldn't be because no one likes a cheater – at least have the foresight to keep it to unprotected servers.

SOURCE: SteamDB