People Playground’s mod scene just hit a full stop when a malicious addon spread through the game’s Steam Workshop, forcing creator Mestiez to disable Workshop support entirely while they figure out what’s going on with Valve.
The problem started to surface earlier this week when players reported weird behavior tied to certain mods. In a Steam update, Mestiez explained that an infected addon was propagating itself via user-created content, prompting immediate instructions on how to safely run the game without touching mods at all. Since People Playground has over 300,000 reviews on Steam, that’s a huge potential blast radius if something nasty starts hitchhiking on popular uploads.
The addon deletes the game’s Contraptions folder, which stores all your saved builds and several other People Playground-related files, nuking your tinkering history in the process. Worse, if you’ve made mods yourself, it can overwrite them with its own code, then spread further when you upload that “updated” version back to the Workshop. Mestiez compared it to The Thing: it hides in plain sight by impersonating trusted content.
The good news is that safeguards are now in place on the game side to prevent further damage, but the Workshop switch is staying off until Valve responds and helps lock things down. Right now, the dev has reached out and is waiting for a real conversation about how this slipped through and what protections can be put in at the platform level.
On its own, this looks like a targeted headache for one physics sandbox, but it’s also a warning shot for every mod-heavy game on Steam. If something like this ever jumped into communities as big as Skyrim or Fallout: New Vegas, it could get ugly in a hurry. People Playground might just be the unlucky canary in the Workshop coal mine.
Source: GamesRadar
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