this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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124
Two indie Steam games were disguised as Helldivers 2 to scam players (www.videogameschronicle.com)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

This is what Steam takes 30% for. Legitimate indie companies submit games and some jobsworth continually rejects it because of incredibly asinine trivial stuff like a word being out of place or literally made up stuff that isn't even real meanwhile companies like this just carry on.

Steam literally has a policy in place that once you pass approval, you can do whatever you want. Why even make them pass approval if they can immediately change it to something that violates their 'standards'?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I mean steam is great at reacting to this stuff right? I doubt they just continue to allow these shenanigans

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Given Steam's refund policy, I really don't get what the plan here was. It's safe to assume that everyone who fell for this would immediately refund.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Many many many people buy, then never even play. They syphon off a percentage of that.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Why even try this? You can refund games within two hours of gametime or two weeks from purchase date. The moment someone launches the game, it's immediatley obvious that it's not Helldivers and smashes that refund button.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

There's probably a decent number of people that buy a game and don't install it immediately. I often do this when something is on sale. By the time they realize they didn't get what they were after, it may be outside the refund window.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If a kid’s got their parent’s credit card, I doubt they will bother with requesting a refund. They’ll just smash other ‘buy’ buttons until the game they want is downloaded. I’m sure some adults are like this, too…

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

It's going to get reported and found by Steam pretty quickly. Steam already holds onto the money from sales for 2 weeks in case they need to issue a refund. Once they discover the scam, which will take less than a week, they won't hand over any of the money.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

And in a case like this, I think steam would refund everyone who made a purchase regardless of if they requested it

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

This could do a lot of harm to Steam,they need to get ahead of this quickly.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

They're way ahead of you. They took care of it within an hour of it happening.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Not really, Steam will refund the buyers, ban the seller, and keep the developer fee they paid. Scammers will be down $100 and everyone else will go on like nothing happened.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Escape from tarkov was also one I believe they have been removed. I'm not exactly sure how it's even possible though for games with names that already exist.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

As someone else mentioned, there's literally new games coming out with the same title as older games, so that's not really an issue. The bigger issue is for a dev can just change their studio name and publisher name to match another? Because the orderly copied everything on the official Helldivers page.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Just noticed this with Last Epoch yesterday as well. There is a false store listing it at $60 usd.

I was looking for a way to report it to Steam but couldn't locate a method to do so.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

There is a little flag icon somewhere on the right of the store page. That's how you report.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Use the Support menu?

[–] [email protected] 45 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

how the fuck is it impossible for me to get a decent, not taken, username in most online games or launchers but these scammers can change their games to whatever the heck they want?

Shouldn't be hard to implement a check if the game name and other info is already listed in the store somewhere else...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I just started typing in common video game title words in Steam's search, and I found several games just called "Void". We can extrapolate that scenario out and say maybe a new game is the first one on Steam to be called Void, but maybe there was an old DOS game called Void that came to Steam later after rights issues have been resolved. There's also the very common situation of a remake and its original version both being available on Steam, and maybe different companies own the rights to each one, like Star Wars: Battlefront. Perhaps these and other reasons are why those checks don't exist, but maybe they will now if these sorts of scams become more common.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (2 children)

maybe different companies own the rights to each one, like Star Wars: Battlefront

It's going to be really confusing soon because there will be;

  • Star Wars: Battlefront
  • Star Wars: Battlefront II
  • Star Wars: Battlefront
  • Star Wars: Battlefront II
  • Star Wars: Battlefront
  • Star Wars: Battlefront II

Battlefront, Battlefront 2, Battlefront and Battlefront 2 are good, but Battlefront and Battlefront 2 are not good.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

You're so god damn wrong. Battlefront 2 was far and away better than Battlefront 2 and I'll fight anyone who says differently.

I do agree that Battlefront 2 was garbage though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I concur. At least the logos for the bad ones have "EA" in the middle of them so that you know which ones to avoid.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago

Display name vs actual user ID, right? You can change your display name to whatever but the actual account name will be the same. Kind of insane that Steam lets you change quite so much in one go without flagging suspicious behaviour though.

[–] [email protected] 108 points 8 months ago (1 children)

They weren't 'indie steam games', they were just a scam. No need to blacken the reputation of actual indie games.

[–] [email protected] 62 points 8 months ago

They were originally indie games that were released back in October, and then the dev just recently changed the store info to match that of helldivers