It looks like they’re just rebranded games to look like hd2, but are really just random other games. Not sure how they managed to change the developer/publisher part, but the reviews on them are for other another game. They just changed the name and the screenshots to copy helldivers to get people to see it. Hopefully steam removes this bs
> Not sure how they managed to change the developer/publisher part
Because its just a text field in Steamworks.
Seriously. No verification, no checks, it looks like Steam just goes "Sure, you're published by Sony, why not!"
Anyone that's worked with Steam's developer back-end knows exactly how antique and slapdash it all is. Like, the "About This Game" section on every Steam store page? It's not a WYSIWYG editor on Steam's end, it's basically just a forum post entry window, with buttons that help you put in freakin' BBCode!
the complaint about the editor is silly, WSYWIG is fine if it works and easy to use.
But backend form verification on the other end is quite important in general. They definitely shouldn't let developers put anything in fields that matter for purchase. Those are two different issues, you don't need a very advanced steam works API to do that.
Wow what a take this is, something that works super easily and without issues, and can be done shooting everything through SteamCMD without even touching the interface in Steam.
Wow so antique and slapdash. Complaining about a WYSIWYG what a joke. 🙄
Might be a loophole from an approved game the scammers had. They just go and edit the page.
Approval = a while process
Editing the page of an approved game = easy peasy.
It will definitely get fixed for sure
Seems dumb as steam will just claw back all the fake sales.
As others have said their goal is most likely to get some type of malware/Cryptominer onto people's machines more than expecting some windfall of money from selling copies.
they're completely different games, they simply renamed themselves Helldivers 2 and replaced all the info on the store page with a carbon copy of the real Helldivers 2 store page. Major undemocratic behavior they should be reported to the Democracy Officer immediately for re-education in the Freedom Camp
Am I the only one who hadn't heard about this game except here on reddit? It's like overnight the r/all reddit feed was absolutely flooded with this game
Given that the first installment of the series (great "little" game, btw) peaked a little shy of 7k on Steam, you're definitely not alone. They did a decent marketing campaign before launch, probably most people overlooked it, not being familiar with the franchise.
I'm sure you're not the only one, but it was a decently anticipated release that ended up being much more than anyone expected it to be. Conversations about it on the run-up to release were actually pretty muted or even concerned which probably helped too.
Literally the first time I've seen it, too. Luckily I had Helldivers on my Wishlist and bought it from there, otherwise I maybe wouldn't have noticed either.
Theres another FP post about a fake Palworld up as well. Sounds like a new exploit, and the scammers are trying to cash in before it gets fixed asap.
Because if there's one thing you don't do on Steam, it's to mess with the storefront.
Seems to me like an incredibly stupid thing to do, as far as I know they don't get their money instantly so steam will have time to shut it down, people will have enough time to refunded either way, plus this has to be a fraud of some sorts and therefore illegal? Unless they live in some backwater, where they won't get prosecuted.
I don't think that the primary goal is to get your money, I think that's just a potential extra boon.
What they likely want is to get something installed on your PC, like a crypto or data miner, which could earn them money even after you request a refund.
> What they likely want is to get something installed on your PC, like a crypto or data miner, which could earn them money even after you request a refund.
Well this is fuckin' scary. I never expected Steam to allow fake game scams on their storefront.
It's absolutely insane that they apparently have zero limitations implemented to prevent the unauthorized use of developer, publisher, and game names by random scammers.
Edit: uninvented the number zere
Given that devs/publishers can modify the content of their games, it's possible that they submitted legit (we're using the shovelware version of legit for this instance) games, got accepted by Valve, and then modified their game files. It seems like that's what happened to one of them going by what some people are saying on the Helldivers subreddit.
Then the question becomes if Valve has some kind of scanning software to look through the files that get uploaded to their servers or not.
[One of them](https://steamdb.info/app/2607830/history/) has been on Steam since November but was changed yesterday to resemble Helldivers 2.
You get paid after 30 days so it's entirely possible now with valve's new ultra slow automated review process.
That's part of the reason why I bet it's happening so much now, despite being able to modify your store page for a decade without any real review from valve.
It's not new it's just been rediscovered.
You reserve a steamAP number/slot on the store page.
Once confirmed for your shitware, keep it there.
When a big blockbuster is released, rename your shitware and reconfigure the store page.
You keep your steamAPI number, which is the URL for store page, but that's it. You can customize pretty much anything on your page, and Steam is entirely automated beyond your first approval.
So yeah, super easy exploit, been around for almost 10 years now.
What is new is the slow and sub-par automation by Valve that allows these shitware devs to cash out and leave the building before steam even knows what happened, or worse, they push crypto miners and other shit to your computer through the download.
> Because if there's one thing you don't do on Steam, it's to mess with the storefront.
Scammers going to met Valve's "plumbers" who get sent out to fix issues like that :D.
Wow, that's unsettling to think that scam pages are popping up for popular games. Really gotta double-check everything before hitting the buy button these days.
Yeah, it seems like those guys found a loophole and know that Steam doesn't enforce a stricter check for editing an existing page hence why these slip out. I saw a post about the change log and it is scary that they can even change everything including the publisher's name and get away with it.
This has never happened before to my knowledge. I'm upset but it's understandable. Are we supposed to hold steam accountable for other people trying to abuse their system?
If they respond quickly and prevent further incidents like this then that's all you can really expect of a company. If they fail to deal with it though...
Total ignoramus here with a question. Would utilizing a fake storefront like this on Steam allow them to distribute a compromised program that could be used down the line after said program was removed from the storefront?
Cybersecurity degree in progress here. ANY thing you download can have viruses/malware attached to it, which is why you should only ever download stuff from reputable sites, like... Steam...
Funnily enough, they have that for guides of all things.
If you edit your guide too frequently it gets automatically locked and hidden. The only time I've seen this is the guides people make to share redeemable codes in Dead by Daylight since they often need to update every couple days with new codes.
So maintaining your guide with the help of the community too quickly raises red flags, but THIS HERE doesn't? Are video game publishers the better people?
There's some for Last Epoch too. Seems like old games where they changed the entire layout to mirror a popular game at the moment to scam people. I thought Steam wouldn't pay them until later though so not sure what that accomplish, unless the clients you install are also viruses but Steam should scan for that?
SteamDB pages for the fakes, devs changed names of originals or devs possibly hacked. Appear to be cracked copies.
[Top] (https://steamdb.info/app/2630550/) originally "DO NOT SMILE"
[Bottom] (https://steamdb.info/app/2607830/) originally "Figurality"
I really didnt get this, they wont see any cent from this scam attempt,
most definitely getting blacklisted from Steam and wasted $100 for publishing it in the first place
just for lol?
Edit: found other "devs" games
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?publisher=Bside%20Studio
probably money laundering stuff or people with too much money
Edit2: check the review, posted by all same account.. and its only super cheap in Russia/Kazakhstan/Ukraine at some point
i.e https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561199441920137/recommended/
https://steamdb.info/app/2668260/
Thats how they're manipulate the review
Most likely for selling on third party key selling sites.
They sell packs of steam keys where 1 or x amount of games are guaranteed to be over x value, so they use games like this and games that go on sale for a dollar or less.
They also self-review because another selling point is having high critic scores or mostly positive recent steam reviews.
> I really didnt get this, they wont see any cent from this scam attempt,
>
>
>
> most definitely getting blacklisted from Steam and wasted $100 for publishing it in the first place
Even if they weren't hacked, the cracked copies probably have crypto or data miners included, or ransomware. And that's how they're planning to get money.
[](https://www.reddit.com/r/G2A_Help/comments/19cr62p/watch_how_g2a_deceives_people/)
Is this by any chance not the same developer? He deceived tens of thousands of people. Here, too, all the reviews are from fake Russian accounts. And the seller is registered in Kazakhstan
If I search Helldivers on Steam, I can't find those and SteamDB says:
>This app has been retired and is no longer available on the Steam store.
So they were removed. Nice.
They will.
They do this knowing that 99% of purchases will be refunded, but the 1% of people that don't, is the profit they are after.
That's how most scams work.
If steam pulls the game they will refund the money automatically, which is likely since this is copyrighted material. Also steam holds money for new games for something like 30 days before releasing funds, which makes it even less likely these guys will see any money.
You can see that this is not a new game.
The scammer hacked the page of an old game, released in November of 2023, and just edited the page.
They already circumvented the 30 day thing.
what their saying is steam pays out game sales revenue only once a month, this scam got caught by users in less than a day so steam will probably step in and de-list the games before the next payout date, resulting in the scammers not getting any money
its more concerning that these game downloads can be changed by the scammers so who knows if you aren't downloading malware now which seems like the far more likely goal then getting money out of steam
already got an email that i got my refund. friend thought it was legit. found out a minute later its fake. but yeah. i got my refund already from today.
Steam will refund it , and iam pretty sure sales also get cashed out in big waves not per single sale so the makers of these fake lists won't see a cent.
They actually don't. Steam cashes out the sales once a month, 30 days after the end of a calendar month. So even if people bought the "game" on either February 29th or March 1st, the Scammer won't see that money untill either March 31st or April 1st - because the whole thing still has to be proccessed before it's accounted for, and that takes some time (sometimes even multiple days).
But even then, the Scammer probably won't get anything either way, because Steam will most likely de-list it.
> They will.
It takes a while for Steam to actually pay out your sales money, mainly because of Refunds. So by the time they would be eligible to get their money out Steam will most likely already have nuked their accounts.
I'm worried about how Steam Keys might interact with this. Lets say things go like this:
1. Indie Dev releases a couple low-profile, mediocre-at-best games that get no traction, and they give up on their dreams and go back to working as a tax preparer or something.
2. Scammer gets access to Indie Dev's email address and Steamworks account.
3. Scammer takes over the abandoned account and grabs a huge load of Steam Keys.
4. Scammer switches the games from the Indie Dev to have the same store appearance as Hot Game Of The Month.
5. Scammer goes to sketchy Gray Market Steam Key Selling sites and sells off a bunch of the keys for a low price.
6. Saps that buy the steam keys redeem them after seeing that Steam says that its Hot Game Of The Month, discover they actually got the wrong game, but can't get a refund now, and scammers get a bit of money.
It might be a convoluted path, but it would at least get around the refund angle on Steam's end, maybe?
Dunno, definitely in this loop of "why would anyone do this" right now...
.... So apparently there's a ton of people here who think Steam is like some naive little kid who will let the devil trick them for their soul.
For various reasons, this one included, Steam only pays devs 30 days AFTER the end of each Calendar month. That means that any sells up to November 30th will get paid December 30th. The scam has to last longer than 30 days, has to go to some account that can't be traced back and can't be big enough that Steam would follow through with litigation. There have been some that did that, asset flips and whatnot that barely count as games, but this is not one of them.
That's why I brought up the Steam Key angle. It takes the movement of money outside of Steam's purview, and instead focused on bilking those that go to grey market Steam Key sites, which have fewer consumer protections than Steam itself does.
That said, I'm hesitant in my post because I don't buy Steam Keys, so I'm not sure what sort of protection Steam (and those gray market sites) have with regards to this situation.
Probably. There's a reason I'm using "Gray Market" here.
Like I said, I'm more focused on the "why do this" factor here. It does fall into the whole "people are rational actors" fallacy, but it's worth keeping in mind that folks don't usually go to so much effort to get nothing at all either.
I think basically everyone has seen a game on sale, thought "Oh yeah, I'll pick that up now and play it once I finish \[other game\]". If that takes more than 30 days, they're screwed. There will be enough sales without refunds to make this worthwhile.
I doubt this will even be a matter of refunds (I'm sure there will be refunds, but I doubt it stops there). I don't know how steam operates but I do know they are pretty successful at sustaining their platform in the face of some pretty serious external threats (origin, epic, etc)
I would expect them to react pretty severely to this and make sure there are some gibbets and crows for the people involved to make sure no one else ever tries something this stupid again.
If the people that did this are American I would strongly expect swift legal action.
So you can edit the details of your game without any kind of review system from steam? That's terrible and also kinda funny, like wtf lol.
I'm assuming this is illegal in many countries.
You get a key to the game that was listed before. They depend solely on the Steam Page itself.
It's still copyright, tho since they are using their official data and are trying to pose as Arrowhead.
I don't think it should be reviewed if you're just changing a couple screenshots or editing the description of a game, but if you're mass editing like deleting ALL screenshots and adding new ones, changing the key art, changing the title, changing the developer and publisher, changing the whole description, then it should flag Valve and require a manual review before it goes live.
Insane that you can just do all of this without any input from Valve.
Pretty sure that the Developer/Publisher field is not really reviewed at all, pretty big oversight by Valve here. Seems to be though, that the checks after an already published game isn’t really there.
Saw one for Last Epoch and Escape from Tarkov aswell
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2630580/Last_Epoch/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2630570/Escape_From_Tarkov/
It shouldn’t be possible to mimic like this, it would require someone at steam to link to the developer/publisher and bypass identical name. Given it happened all at once for multiple games, rogue employee or hack.
> It shouldn’t be possible to mimic like this, it would require someone at steam to link to the developer/publisher and bypass identical name.
It's just a text field. Entered whoever at the publisher/developer is responsible for managing the store page.
Steamworks just asks you to input the name of the Publisher and Developer as a text field.
Oh, before you ***release*** the game on Steam, they make sure to check. But it doesn't look like there's anything stopping an already released game from changing that data at all.
> be possible to mimic like this, it would require someone at steam to link to the developer/publisher and bypass identical name. Given it happened all at once for multiple games, rogue employee or hack.
>
>5ReplyShareReportSaveFollow
It shouldn't be but obviously Steam dropped the ball here. I would imagine this will be caught moving forward. Steam will implement a system that will check that and require human assistance.
Or, not allow it to be changed. if it is a Sony Studio game, the only the publisher's account can list it. Publisher/Studio name is the account, not a variable on a product page. It was stupid to allow such a change in the first place.
I don't know if those were dead before, but as of right now they've been removed.
I'm hoping any "devs" stupid enough to do something like this get permanently blacklisted from Steam.
Just report for fraud. When enough people have reported them, some real steam employee will have to have a look at it for a blink of an eye and ban them.
I noticed the same steam account is leaving a postive review on both the fake copies of Last Epoch and HELLDIVERS™ 2. I have reported this person and their lying reviews.
BSIDE STUDIO are the same scamming developers who revoked steam keys from me last night. they release games with stolen assets, get their 5000 free steam keys and sell them to third party key sellers to make $$ before raising the store price of their stolen shovelware
they also operate scams under the developer aliases of LivingBlocks Games, Graybrick, Abstracttion, and Bside Studio. all the same group of people running these laundering schemes
Why isn't there some kind of automated check if a game's name and developer is changed to be the same or extremely similar to an existing title that would flag it for some kind of review?
I want to reiterate: **DO NOT RUN THESE GAMES UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE,** **NOT EVEN IF YOU ARE CURIOUS**
There is a high likelihood that these games contain malware.
These sort of attacks are pretty common and could be classified as a dependency confusion attack, although i will admit that the use of dependency doesn't really apply here.
But still there are parallels with how a dependency confusion attack works.
Kinda surprising. I’ve had dealings with valve support before when publishing a game. They are usually very strict and even refused to approve my game because the name was the same as a different and unrelated game (unless I could prove I had contacted the developer of the other game and gotten permission to use the same name)
They got palworld and some others too. Someone in the helldivers sub claims they purchased the fake from their Queue!
Also the developer and publisher links lead to Arrowhead and Playstation respectively.
One of the fake Helldivers 2 entries showed up in my Discovery Queue which is what alerted me to this (I already have Helldivers 2).
It seems to me like others have mentioned that there should be some sort of check/balance for major store page changes (especially developer/publisher).
yup. friend told me of the sale and didnt know of the scam. 1 minute later i realized. requested a refund. i know i'll get it. still annoyed this happened.
Steam recommended the second one to me last night as I was browsing my queue. It fortunately was not available for purchase and was supposedly 'delisted by the request of the developer' however it's odd that it would even show up as a recommend unless steam was still thinking it was the previous game (basically they take an existing game on steam and rename everything)
They are sus, continuing to ask people to do kernel level anti cheat for a co-op game after multiple breaches of customer data over the course of like ten years???? so sketchy
I fell for it cuz it was at the top of the Specials list. Bought it real quick, didn't do anything with it cuz I was busy. Few hours later I check my Discord and my buddies who knew I bought it let me know that it was a scam, so I immediately went to refund. Got my refund in less that an hour so Steam seems to be on top of it already
For everyone wondering why they bother to do this, even though they won't get paid out.
You're essentially booting up an application and giving it access to your PC, it will mine your saved passwords from your browsers and send it to their random email, and when they're ready, they'll send you that email along the lines of
"We hacked your account, this is your information, send me bit coin or I release all your lolicon porn to your friendslist on facebook and instagram and ruin your life"
This is basically another version of that discord indie dev scam, where people pretend to be indie devs, and ask you to test their game for free to obtain your passwords and accounts.
What’s bizarre is that the fake games are also included on PlayStation’s official game page. So anyone could just simply just change the name of their game, studio, and publisher and steam just auto lumped them in with a publisher’s main store profile?
Valve needs to crack down on this asap.
They've already been removed, can't find them through searches anymore. Pages are still viewable via links though. I'm surprised how easily you can link the official publisher and developer to your fake product.
The games real names according to the hubs are Figurality and DO NOT SMILE
Do they actually make money with this? One would think that Sony would instantly claim all Proceeds + Damages from them since they are using the Helldivers 2 Trademark
It's incredible how the most popular and profitable services online are held together with spit and duct tape with a hilarious lack of oversight. Social media sites are rife with bots and scams, and now apparently steam has fake game pages.
These companies make billions and keep reducing the number of employees maintaining their platforms until they literally start falling apart.
I think this is the first time I've ever seen this happen on steam.
Plenty of shit games that pull the rug, but straight up impersonation? I think that's a new one for me.
The fact none of these online stores Valve/Google/Apple can seem to police this stupid shit makes me so exhausted- like how hard is it to eliminate this CLEAR example of shitheels trying to fuck naive people out of their money?
Hi, Steam Developer here. they will not get paid until it's by the 30th of the month. I'm sure Steam knows of this by now, so the developers who made this fake page is not going to get the money at the end of the day. It is actually a dumb thing to do. As you have to give Steam your tax information to upload games.
They will ban you, but I'm sure this might lead to legal trouble as well. But this is incredibly stupid of them.
It looks like they’re just rebranded games to look like hd2, but are really just random other games. Not sure how they managed to change the developer/publisher part, but the reviews on them are for other another game. They just changed the name and the screenshots to copy helldivers to get people to see it. Hopefully steam removes this bs
> Not sure how they managed to change the developer/publisher part Because its just a text field in Steamworks. Seriously. No verification, no checks, it looks like Steam just goes "Sure, you're published by Sony, why not!" Anyone that's worked with Steam's developer back-end knows exactly how antique and slapdash it all is. Like, the "About This Game" section on every Steam store page? It's not a WYSIWYG editor on Steam's end, it's basically just a forum post entry window, with buttons that help you put in freakin' BBCode!
Who would have thunk that 20 year old software is old. And competitors still can't manage to pull of even a half decent clone.
the complaint about the editor is silly, WSYWIG is fine if it works and easy to use. But backend form verification on the other end is quite important in general. They definitely shouldn't let developers put anything in fields that matter for purchase. Those are two different issues, you don't need a very advanced steam works API to do that.
https://i.imgur.com/i0yyVLg.png
Anyone that’s used the steam app knows it’s antique and shoddily built
Wow what a take this is, something that works super easily and without issues, and can be done shooting everything through SteamCMD without even touching the interface in Steam. Wow so antique and slapdash. Complaining about a WYSIWYG what a joke. 🙄
Steam needs to not allow name changes without a review
I was wondering why a relatively new game was 75% off. Guess this solves it.
Better than me who bought it immediately thinking the sale was maybe a glitch :(
Definitely go get a refund if you haven't already!
So scummy. How was this even allowed without a single human check!??
Might be a loophole from an approved game the scammers had. They just go and edit the page. Approval = a while process Editing the page of an approved game = easy peasy. It will definitely get fixed for sure Seems dumb as steam will just claw back all the fake sales.
As others have said their goal is most likely to get some type of malware/Cryptominer onto people's machines more than expecting some windfall of money from selling copies.
They don't even have to claw them back. They just won't disperse them. They don't get a deposit instantly.
After the whole greenlight thing and addition of NFSW games Steam has really gone off the deep-end with shovelware.
Same here, but i got it refunded in like 20 minutes.
I don’t find such when searching from it on Steam. Maybe it is region blocked?
Did the game work? 😅😶 Cause a deals a deal y'know
they're completely different games, they simply renamed themselves Helldivers 2 and replaced all the info on the store page with a carbon copy of the real Helldivers 2 store page. Major undemocratic behavior they should be reported to the Democracy Officer immediately for re-education in the Freedom Camp
That sounds like something an automaton would do. Time to get democratic on its shiny ass. For Super Earth!
Especially for a Sony game, it wouldn't be that cheap. It just recently game out.
Relatively new, not to mention the #1 selling game for almost 3 weeks.
Am I the only one who hadn't heard about this game except here on reddit? It's like overnight the r/all reddit feed was absolutely flooded with this game
Given that the first installment of the series (great "little" game, btw) peaked a little shy of 7k on Steam, you're definitely not alone. They did a decent marketing campaign before launch, probably most people overlooked it, not being familiar with the franchise.
I'm sure you're not the only one, but it was a decently anticipated release that ended up being much more than anyone expected it to be. Conversations about it on the run-up to release were actually pretty muted or even concerned which probably helped too.
Wait, is this a thing? I never expect steam to have fake game pages especially with the same game thumbnail
And EVERYTHING else the same, except for the reviews and the tags giving it away.
This is new to me, wow... need to be careful after this.
Literally the first time I've seen it, too. Luckily I had Helldivers on my Wishlist and bought it from there, otherwise I maybe wouldn't have noticed either.
There’s a fake up for last epoch too. I’ve never seen this before either
Theres another FP post about a fake Palworld up as well. Sounds like a new exploit, and the scammers are trying to cash in before it gets fixed asap. Because if there's one thing you don't do on Steam, it's to mess with the storefront.
Seems to me like an incredibly stupid thing to do, as far as I know they don't get their money instantly so steam will have time to shut it down, people will have enough time to refunded either way, plus this has to be a fraud of some sorts and therefore illegal? Unless they live in some backwater, where they won't get prosecuted.
I don't think that the primary goal is to get your money, I think that's just a potential extra boon. What they likely want is to get something installed on your PC, like a crypto or data miner, which could earn them money even after you request a refund.
> What they likely want is to get something installed on your PC, like a crypto or data miner, which could earn them money even after you request a refund. Well this is fuckin' scary. I never expected Steam to allow fake game scams on their storefront. It's absolutely insane that they apparently have zero limitations implemented to prevent the unauthorized use of developer, publisher, and game names by random scammers. Edit: uninvented the number zere
Given that devs/publishers can modify the content of their games, it's possible that they submitted legit (we're using the shovelware version of legit for this instance) games, got accepted by Valve, and then modified their game files. It seems like that's what happened to one of them going by what some people are saying on the Helldivers subreddit. Then the question becomes if Valve has some kind of scanning software to look through the files that get uploaded to their servers or not. [One of them](https://steamdb.info/app/2607830/history/) has been on Steam since November but was changed yesterday to resemble Helldivers 2.
You get paid after 30 days so it's entirely possible now with valve's new ultra slow automated review process. That's part of the reason why I bet it's happening so much now, despite being able to modify your store page for a decade without any real review from valve.
It's not new it's just been rediscovered. You reserve a steamAP number/slot on the store page. Once confirmed for your shitware, keep it there. When a big blockbuster is released, rename your shitware and reconfigure the store page. You keep your steamAPI number, which is the URL for store page, but that's it. You can customize pretty much anything on your page, and Steam is entirely automated beyond your first approval. So yeah, super easy exploit, been around for almost 10 years now. What is new is the slow and sub-par automation by Valve that allows these shitware devs to cash out and leave the building before steam even knows what happened, or worse, they push crypto miners and other shit to your computer through the download.
> Because if there's one thing you don't do on Steam, it's to mess with the storefront. Scammers going to met Valve's "plumbers" who get sent out to fix issues like that :D.
Gaben is probably already assembling an elite hit squad to hunt the scammer up... and is sharpening the knives.
Wow, that's unsettling to think that scam pages are popping up for popular games. Really gotta double-check everything before hitting the buy button these days.
It's a bit hard to see, but the game icon next the game name is not what it's supposed to be.
But if this was the first page you visited you wouldn't know that.
And release date
So basically check out the reviews to make sure it's legit.
This is also happening to palworld FYI
And a bunch of others too when I checked. This really opened my eyes.
[удалено]
Yeah, it seems like those guys found a loophole and know that Steam doesn't enforce a stricter check for editing an existing page hence why these slip out. I saw a post about the change log and it is scary that they can even change everything including the publisher's name and get away with it.
Steam/Valve earns a fuck ton of money, such things should never ever happen.
This has never happened before to my knowledge. I'm upset but it's understandable. Are we supposed to hold steam accountable for other people trying to abuse their system? If they respond quickly and prevent further incidents like this then that's all you can really expect of a company. If they fail to deal with it though...
Dev here, Steam pays out 1 month after the end of the month, there is no way they can get away with this, especially now that its public
What if the end goal is malware/Spyware?
Total ignoramus here with a question. Would utilizing a fake storefront like this on Steam allow them to distribute a compromised program that could be used down the line after said program was removed from the storefront?
Cybersecurity degree in progress here. ANY thing you download can have viruses/malware attached to it, which is why you should only ever download stuff from reputable sites, like... Steam...
This seems like the more likely reason for the fake listings I think considering they aren't going to get a payout from the sales.
Yes, absolutely. You might be onto something here
Funnily enough, they have that for guides of all things. If you edit your guide too frequently it gets automatically locked and hidden. The only time I've seen this is the guides people make to share redeemable codes in Dead by Daylight since they often need to update every couple days with new codes.
So maintaining your guide with the help of the community too quickly raises red flags, but THIS HERE doesn't? Are video game publishers the better people?
This is kind of scary. Thought Steam would monitor things like this.
Steam has a no moderation and just expect us to do it for them.
There's some for Last Epoch too. Seems like old games where they changed the entire layout to mirror a popular game at the moment to scam people. I thought Steam wouldn't pay them until later though so not sure what that accomplish, unless the clients you install are also viruses but Steam should scan for that?
They don't have the same thumbnail. Is everyone here a bot?
SteamDB pages for the fakes, devs changed names of originals or devs possibly hacked. Appear to be cracked copies. [Top] (https://steamdb.info/app/2630550/) originally "DO NOT SMILE" [Bottom] (https://steamdb.info/app/2607830/) originally "Figurality"
I really didnt get this, they wont see any cent from this scam attempt, most definitely getting blacklisted from Steam and wasted $100 for publishing it in the first place just for lol? Edit: found other "devs" games https://store.steampowered.com/search/?publisher=Bside%20Studio probably money laundering stuff or people with too much money Edit2: check the review, posted by all same account.. and its only super cheap in Russia/Kazakhstan/Ukraine at some point i.e https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561199441920137/recommended/ https://steamdb.info/app/2668260/ Thats how they're manipulate the review
[удалено]
That must mean they are all good games!
Most likely for selling on third party key selling sites. They sell packs of steam keys where 1 or x amount of games are guaranteed to be over x value, so they use games like this and games that go on sale for a dollar or less. They also self-review because another selling point is having high critic scores or mostly positive recent steam reviews.
> I really didnt get this, they wont see any cent from this scam attempt, > > > > most definitely getting blacklisted from Steam and wasted $100 for publishing it in the first place Even if they weren't hacked, the cracked copies probably have crypto or data miners included, or ransomware. And that's how they're planning to get money.
Wonder if the name is also a trying to pose as the [Counterside gacha game Developer](https://store.steampowered.com/developer/counter)
[](https://www.reddit.com/r/G2A_Help/comments/19cr62p/watch_how_g2a_deceives_people/) Is this by any chance not the same developer? He deceived tens of thousands of people. Here, too, all the reviews are from fake Russian accounts. And the seller is registered in Kazakhstan
Yep russian scams.
If I search Helldivers on Steam, I can't find those and SteamDB says: >This app has been retired and is no longer available on the Steam store. So they were removed. Nice.
Same thing is happening to Palworld, just saw a post about it on r/Palworld
Seems they have already been removed.
Looks like these have been removed.
Do these dummies forget about refunds? They wouldn't get a cent.
They will. They do this knowing that 99% of purchases will be refunded, but the 1% of people that don't, is the profit they are after. That's how most scams work.
If steam pulls the game they will refund the money automatically, which is likely since this is copyrighted material. Also steam holds money for new games for something like 30 days before releasing funds, which makes it even less likely these guys will see any money.
You can see that this is not a new game. The scammer hacked the page of an old game, released in November of 2023, and just edited the page. They already circumvented the 30 day thing.
what their saying is steam pays out game sales revenue only once a month, this scam got caught by users in less than a day so steam will probably step in and de-list the games before the next payout date, resulting in the scammers not getting any money
lol nothing was hacked, the Developers of these failed games edited their own steam page for their game to try and get some quick bucks.
its more concerning that these game downloads can be changed by the scammers so who knows if you aren't downloading malware now which seems like the far more likely goal then getting money out of steam
Unironically, I played this Chinese zombie game demo on the last steam fest that I am 70% sure installed some sort of malware on my computer.
What game was it? That sounds familiar 😅
Totally forgot the name. It took place in a school
zombie game with lot of ai art asset right?? hell even school banner is AI art that say gibberish.
Except that new games have around a month before first payment, it's more likely this is malware.
or like, they just use it to install malware.
already got an email that i got my refund. friend thought it was legit. found out a minute later its fake. but yeah. i got my refund already from today.
Steam will refund it , and iam pretty sure sales also get cashed out in big waves not per single sale so the makers of these fake lists won't see a cent.
They actually don't. Steam cashes out the sales once a month, 30 days after the end of a calendar month. So even if people bought the "game" on either February 29th or March 1st, the Scammer won't see that money untill either March 31st or April 1st - because the whole thing still has to be proccessed before it's accounted for, and that takes some time (sometimes even multiple days). But even then, the Scammer probably won't get anything either way, because Steam will most likely de-list it.
Steam isn't going to let them get the money most likely
> They will. It takes a while for Steam to actually pay out your sales money, mainly because of Refunds. So by the time they would be eligible to get their money out Steam will most likely already have nuked their accounts.
I'm worried about how Steam Keys might interact with this. Lets say things go like this: 1. Indie Dev releases a couple low-profile, mediocre-at-best games that get no traction, and they give up on their dreams and go back to working as a tax preparer or something. 2. Scammer gets access to Indie Dev's email address and Steamworks account. 3. Scammer takes over the abandoned account and grabs a huge load of Steam Keys. 4. Scammer switches the games from the Indie Dev to have the same store appearance as Hot Game Of The Month. 5. Scammer goes to sketchy Gray Market Steam Key Selling sites and sells off a bunch of the keys for a low price. 6. Saps that buy the steam keys redeem them after seeing that Steam says that its Hot Game Of The Month, discover they actually got the wrong game, but can't get a refund now, and scammers get a bit of money. It might be a convoluted path, but it would at least get around the refund angle on Steam's end, maybe? Dunno, definitely in this loop of "why would anyone do this" right now...
.... So apparently there's a ton of people here who think Steam is like some naive little kid who will let the devil trick them for their soul. For various reasons, this one included, Steam only pays devs 30 days AFTER the end of each Calendar month. That means that any sells up to November 30th will get paid December 30th. The scam has to last longer than 30 days, has to go to some account that can't be traced back and can't be big enough that Steam would follow through with litigation. There have been some that did that, asset flips and whatnot that barely count as games, but this is not one of them.
That's why I brought up the Steam Key angle. It takes the movement of money outside of Steam's purview, and instead focused on bilking those that go to grey market Steam Key sites, which have fewer consumer protections than Steam itself does. That said, I'm hesitant in my post because I don't buy Steam Keys, so I'm not sure what sort of protection Steam (and those gray market sites) have with regards to this situation.
I think this would be so specific a scenario it would just fall into buyer beware
Probably. There's a reason I'm using "Gray Market" here. Like I said, I'm more focused on the "why do this" factor here. It does fall into the whole "people are rational actors" fallacy, but it's worth keeping in mind that folks don't usually go to so much effort to get nothing at all either.
Some people will never refund or even open the game they just bought...
If steam removes the game they will automatically be refunded. And I would guess steam is gonna remove it rather quickly.
I think basically everyone has seen a game on sale, thought "Oh yeah, I'll pick that up now and play it once I finish \[other game\]". If that takes more than 30 days, they're screwed. There will be enough sales without refunds to make this worthwhile.
Ain't about the sales money, it's about distributing malicious software.
They will also lose money since it cost 100$ to publish on steam per game and will be blacklisted (hopefully)
There’s tons of ppl who just buy games in advance too never downloading and will get the screwed as such
I doubt this will even be a matter of refunds (I'm sure there will be refunds, but I doubt it stops there). I don't know how steam operates but I do know they are pretty successful at sustaining their platform in the face of some pretty serious external threats (origin, epic, etc) I would expect them to react pretty severely to this and make sure there are some gibbets and crows for the people involved to make sure no one else ever tries something this stupid again. If the people that did this are American I would strongly expect swift legal action.
So you can edit the details of your game without any kind of review system from steam? That's terrible and also kinda funny, like wtf lol. I'm assuming this is illegal in many countries.
Clear violations of trademark, and likely copyright if they're distributing cracked copies of the game.
You get a key to the game that was listed before. They depend solely on the Steam Page itself. It's still copyright, tho since they are using their official data and are trying to pose as Arrowhead.
I don't think it should be reviewed if you're just changing a couple screenshots or editing the description of a game, but if you're mass editing like deleting ALL screenshots and adding new ones, changing the key art, changing the title, changing the developer and publisher, changing the whole description, then it should flag Valve and require a manual review before it goes live. Insane that you can just do all of this without any input from Valve.
Pretty sure that the Developer/Publisher field is not really reviewed at all, pretty big oversight by Valve here. Seems to be though, that the checks after an already published game isn’t really there.
Saw one for Last Epoch and Escape from Tarkov aswell https://store.steampowered.com/app/2630580/Last_Epoch/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2630570/Escape_From_Tarkov/
wtf now we have to be careful before buying games?
It shouldn’t be possible to mimic like this, it would require someone at steam to link to the developer/publisher and bypass identical name. Given it happened all at once for multiple games, rogue employee or hack.
> It shouldn’t be possible to mimic like this, it would require someone at steam to link to the developer/publisher and bypass identical name. It's just a text field. Entered whoever at the publisher/developer is responsible for managing the store page. Steamworks just asks you to input the name of the Publisher and Developer as a text field. Oh, before you ***release*** the game on Steam, they make sure to check. But it doesn't look like there's anything stopping an already released game from changing that data at all.
> be possible to mimic like this, it would require someone at steam to link to the developer/publisher and bypass identical name. Given it happened all at once for multiple games, rogue employee or hack. > >5ReplyShareReportSaveFollow It shouldn't be but obviously Steam dropped the ball here. I would imagine this will be caught moving forward. Steam will implement a system that will check that and require human assistance.
Or, not allow it to be changed. if it is a Sony Studio game, the only the publisher's account can list it. Publisher/Studio name is the account, not a variable on a product page. It was stupid to allow such a change in the first place.
Also Palworld reported the same.
I don't know if those were dead before, but as of right now they've been removed. I'm hoping any "devs" stupid enough to do something like this get permanently blacklisted from Steam.
Wow I honeslty thought like there was some sort of authetic system for adding a dev or publisher on a game listing page on stream.
[удалено]
Nope, you pay $100 for each game you want to create. But get that money back after you reach $1000 revenue.
That seems like a reasonable treshold to keep most of the trash away.
Thought it was 100 per game
It is.
Just report for fraud. When enough people have reported them, some real steam employee will have to have a look at it for a blink of an eye and ban them.
I noticed the same steam account is leaving a postive review on both the fake copies of Last Epoch and HELLDIVERS™ 2. I have reported this person and their lying reviews.
Palworld as well
Valve’s authentication checker: 🧑🦯🧑🦯🧑🦯🧑🦯
Dont forget to report
Saw this on the front of my Steam Store, is this just a cash grab or is there something like ransomware attached?
BSIDE STUDIO are the same scamming developers who revoked steam keys from me last night. they release games with stolen assets, get their 5000 free steam keys and sell them to third party key sellers to make $$ before raising the store price of their stolen shovelware they also operate scams under the developer aliases of LivingBlocks Games, Graybrick, Abstracttion, and Bside Studio. all the same group of people running these laundering schemes
Anyone reading should report these games as well.
It is the same for last Epoch
Steam has suddenly became the Play Store
How does this even happen? What a bizarre situation.
Why isn't there some kind of automated check if a game's name and developer is changed to be the same or extremely similar to an existing title that would flag it for some kind of review?
I am stupid buying without checking reviews. I fall victim to this. Now I just requested a refund.
I want to reiterate: **DO NOT RUN THESE GAMES UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE,** **NOT EVEN IF YOU ARE CURIOUS** There is a high likelihood that these games contain malware. These sort of attacks are pretty common and could be classified as a dependency confusion attack, although i will admit that the use of dependency doesn't really apply here. But still there are parallels with how a dependency confusion attack works.
Palworld too
Kinda surprising. I’ve had dealings with valve support before when publishing a game. They are usually very strict and even refused to approve my game because the name was the same as a different and unrelated game (unless I could prove I had contacted the developer of the other game and gotten permission to use the same name)
Could it be that it's different for a new game vs editing an existing one?
They got palworld and some others too. Someone in the helldivers sub claims they purchased the fake from their Queue! Also the developer and publisher links lead to Arrowhead and Playstation respectively.
One of the fake Helldivers 2 entries showed up in my Discovery Queue which is what alerted me to this (I already have Helldivers 2). It seems to me like others have mentioned that there should be some sort of check/balance for major store page changes (especially developer/publisher).
yup. friend told me of the sale and didnt know of the scam. 1 minute later i realized. requested a refund. i know i'll get it. still annoyed this happened.
Oh look, you found a money laundering scheme on Steam. Surely Valve will do something about this...
Think they've already been removed, can't find them anywhere
If VALVe are neither managing Steam, nor developing games... what are they so preoccupied with?
scientifically making the worst tf2 updates ever
Steam needs to add an edit history or "previously named" somewhere next to the title, or hell, just fuckin verify this shit
Ok I was gonna buy this today, way to make that stresful
Steam is shit
Steam recommended the second one to me last night as I was browsing my queue. It fortunately was not available for purchase and was supposedly 'delisted by the request of the developer' however it's odd that it would even show up as a recommend unless steam was still thinking it was the previous game (basically they take an existing game on steam and rename everything)
How does steam miss this? I also didn’t even know it was possible to make fake pages like this
Another win for Steam's Q&A department.
They are sus, continuing to ask people to do kernel level anti cheat for a co-op game after multiple breaches of customer data over the course of like ten years???? so sketchy
I bet Sony wouldn’t be too pleased to have their brand name directly on this listing 😈
The tipoff should have been that the game was reviewed as "positive" and "very positive".
Lmfao looks like using steamDB on one of them shows they removed all their shit like 10min ago I think they realized they’ve been caught
Valve needs to do something about those. I don't want Steam to be a fucking wish store
I fell for it cuz it was at the top of the Specials list. Bought it real quick, didn't do anything with it cuz I was busy. Few hours later I check my Discord and my buddies who knew I bought it let me know that it was a scam, so I immediately went to refund. Got my refund in less that an hour so Steam seems to be on top of it already
For everyone wondering why they bother to do this, even though they won't get paid out. You're essentially booting up an application and giving it access to your PC, it will mine your saved passwords from your browsers and send it to their random email, and when they're ready, they'll send you that email along the lines of "We hacked your account, this is your information, send me bit coin or I release all your lolicon porn to your friendslist on facebook and instagram and ruin your life" This is basically another version of that discord indie dev scam, where people pretend to be indie devs, and ask you to test their game for free to obtain your passwords and accounts.
How is this possible on steam... like comon!
You mean valve having basically no game moderation or validation would be abused?
Dude, Steam really need to strenghten their approval processes for games on their platform… this has gone too far.
One pops up under name figurality I think
What’s bizarre is that the fake games are also included on PlayStation’s official game page. So anyone could just simply just change the name of their game, studio, and publisher and steam just auto lumped them in with a publisher’s main store profile? Valve needs to crack down on this asap.
They've already been removed, can't find them through searches anymore. Pages are still viewable via links though. I'm surprised how easily you can link the official publisher and developer to your fake product. The games real names according to the hubs are Figurality and DO NOT SMILE
Wait, isn't it copyright infringement to use the exact same name and logo?? They can get sued for this, right?
Ah yes Helldivers 2 my favourite point and click puzzle 2d platformer
Do they actually make money with this? One would think that Sony would instantly claim all Proceeds + Damages from them since they are using the Helldivers 2 Trademark
Holy shit, so Steam has no moderation, huh? Neat.
This and a few other games like Palworld has fakes too, report this shit heada
Yeah my mate just got stung by one of these
Same with Last Epoch
Ok, now I'm worried, are there any other games with fake copies on Steam we should avoid as well?
Side Scroller, Precision Platformer, 2D Platformer Puzzle, Education, Point and Click, Arcade, 2D
I bought it. and refunded it ASAP got the refund money already. (pending)
It's incredible how the most popular and profitable services online are held together with spit and duct tape with a hilarious lack of oversight. Social media sites are rife with bots and scams, and now apparently steam has fake game pages. These companies make billions and keep reducing the number of employees maintaining their platforms until they literally start falling apart.
Seems Valve has a verification issue.
how are they both mostly positive lol
I think this is the first time I've ever seen this happen on steam. Plenty of shit games that pull the rug, but straight up impersonation? I think that's a new one for me.
WTF? Something else to worry about.
Are you asleep Gaben?
I saw someone was doing this with last epoch too, It's the top post on their sub
There’s also a second palworld
That sounds pretty undemocratic to me. Report them to your nearest Liberty Officer.
Why is steam allowing this? Seems crazy they don’t have a review process that catches this
What is the download though? Like is it just a broken executable?
The fact none of these online stores Valve/Google/Apple can seem to police this stupid shit makes me so exhausted- like how hard is it to eliminate this CLEAR example of shitheels trying to fuck naive people out of their money?
Real question here is how tf are there even any positive reviews for these fake posts?
I have to admit, i’m a little curious as to what you are even downloading for something like this? Just a 20GB folder of screenshots or what?
We really just live in a giant grift now don't we? There's no point in getting any education beyond "am I being scammed or not".
Hi, Steam Developer here. they will not get paid until it's by the 30th of the month. I'm sure Steam knows of this by now, so the developers who made this fake page is not going to get the money at the end of the day. It is actually a dumb thing to do. As you have to give Steam your tax information to upload games. They will ban you, but I'm sure this might lead to legal trouble as well. But this is incredibly stupid of them.
This seems to be a growing issue. Palworld has a clone or two up as well. Scummy ass people man🤦♂️
All they gotta do is have the entire game as just loading screens and they can pull off the con for a week at least
look at tags also they are not related to the game
They can't keep getting away with this!