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Emprom Games’ thrilling indie roguelike game Bioprototype is available for free on Steam right now. A Vampire Survivors-like auto battler, the brand-new indie game has been made free after the game’s original publisher broke Valve’s publisher policy.
In a statement to fans, developer Emprom Games apologised to fans after the game was initially removed from Steam. The developer explained that the initial “compensation plan” did not meet fan expectations, but the game has since been made free for all from May 20 until July 20 2026.
“In early 2024, the publisher broke Steam rules,” the developer explained on Steam. “Since we’re not the administrator of the publisher team, we’re unable to know the details of the violation. As a result, their Steam account was permanently banned, and all games they published (including ours) were removed forever.”
Alongside Bioprototype, the developer also released a sequel titled Bioweaver which was published independently. As such, the sequel was not removed from sale, but the original game was sadly removed.
“We handled the crisis poorly,” the developer wrote. “From June 2024 to the present, in order to maintain the basic operating funds of the company, we chose to focus on developing the new project and entrusted an outsourcing service agency to handle over 100,000 players’ key requests manually. During this period, we hoped to explain the situation to Steam to restore the game and communicated with the official through various channels multiple times, but were ultimately rejected. These wrong measures lead to the untimely or missing issuance of keys.”
As a result, the developer has made Bioprototype completely free for everyone on Steam for the next couple of months. While the game is currently labelled as “unsupported” on Steam Deck, we got the game to run very well on Valve’s handheld and it was a joy to play.
Additionally, players who pick up the game and enjoy it enough to buy the sequel will get 20% off the “Bio-series Bundle” when buying the bundle.
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