Valve has removed several fraudulent Steam listings posing as Helldivers 2, which were actually unrelated games masquerading as the widely popular co-op shooter.
These deceitful listings were designed to deceive users into buying fraudulent products disguised as “Helldivers 2” on sale, with discounts of 50% and 75%.
Before their removal, the store listings themselves displayed entirely different games. Valve, as a company, appears to have minimal standards for games on its platform, as evidenced by recent approvals of games utilizing AI assets, while simultaneously banning Japanese-style games for the appearance of fictional characters.
Despite this, the world’s largest PC DRM platform lacks precautionary measures to review and curate changes made by developers to their games already listed on the Steam storefront, including alterations to names, descriptions, and promotional images attached to the store listings.
Valve will ban games for featuring women with small breasts, but freely allows developers to radically alter their store listings, allowing malicious individuals to masquerade their games as whichever game is popular at the moment.
Publishers identified as Fest Studio and Bside Studio seem to be responsible for these scams. Fest Studio not only attempted to impersonate the Helldivers 2 page but also altered the page of a game named Furious Rage into a fraudulent Last Epoch page. Fortunately, the latter is no longer available on Steam, eliminating the risk of falling victim to the scam.
Valve promptly addressed the fraudulent Helldivers 2 pages, but it seems the issue extends beyond just Arrowhead’s shooter. Bucky, the community chief of Palworld, tweeted about a sudden surge of fake games that emerged on Steam, which they described as “quite concerning.”
Bucky mentioned that Steam removed a fake Palworld listing almost immediately after developer Pocketpair reported it. “Hope no one was tricked into buying it!” Bucky emphasized.
This concept is not entirely new. Many years ago, malicious indie games on the Steam store were able to include and distribute their own “items” similar to those found in games like Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. These items could then be traded with other Steam users or sold on the Steam Community Market.
One notable example was the game “Abstractism,” which not only offered virtual items but also occasionally altered them to resemble valuable items like TF2 “Australium” weapons. This mimicry could potentially be used for scamming, as the items’ names and descriptions matched those of valuable virtual items.
However, most of the items were merely humorous gags, such as the “Gay Box,” which humorously required the user to identify as gay to open.
Valve is currently under scrutiny for permitting rogue developers to freely alter crucial aspects of their games’ Steam store listings. This enables them to mimic popular titles and offer them at significant discounts compared to the authentic versions.
However, Valve bans such individuals and likely restricts their access to profits and funds, it’s unknown whether or not the developers themselves managed to walk away with cash in their pockets, but those duped will likely be given a refund by Valve given that the games were pulled from the storefront for such a reason.
Given Valve’s immense judgement of games containing “minors” while hypocritically allowing sexual content involving underage male characters, one would expect them to implement a review process for developers seeking to modify their store pages, especially considering that over ten thousand games are released on the Steam store every single year, this problem is only going to get worse until Gabe gets off his arse and actually does something about it.
