If you’re hoping to hop onto the bandwagon for several popular live-service games with friends, be careful about clicking that purchase button too quickly. A game studio was caught falsifying Steam pages to bait false purchases, imitating several massively-popular live-service games.
So far, the largest games copied by these fake pages appear to be Helldivers 2, Palworld and Last Epoch. Each of separate genres and united by hype and multiplayer capabilities, each of these games saw massive audiences in the first several weeks of release, even as their releases relatively overlapped. It also appears in one case, Escape from Tarkov was also copied briefly this week. In the cases of Palworld, devs confirmed their pages were being faked.
It seems some predatory game studios (if they even are that) wanted to try to cash in on players pulling the trigger to join their friends too fast. Several studios took their smaller games and replaced all the titles, assets and details, where possible, with those of the games they were imitating. It’s fairly easy, as anyone can grab images and videos off the Steam pages and re-upload them as need be.
Thankfully, last we checked, these pages have been removed from Steam entirely. Still, it doesn’t guarantee this won’t happen again. For those that fell for it, it does seem Steam is giving refunds.
On Steam, it’s possible to ensure a game is what you think it is by checking a release date and reviews, as well as other minute details. However, most players aren’t going to double-check these details when they’re jumping in to join their friends, so long as the name and media check out.
If you see a recent release with a sale that’s too good to be true, always be sure; official social media pages for games usually like to share sales to promote you actually buying their game. And if you’re absolutely sure you see one of those scam pages, be sure to report it to Steam (or whatever marketplace you find it on).
