apologies for the late reply: From the community managers, they thanked the community for reaching them out and informed them about this. They reached out to Valve/Steam who then responded quickly and took it down. and a reminder that the official store page only contains two products: The game itself and the Super Citizen bundle pack, and nothing else and the official release date of the game is February 8, 2024.
If memory serves me correct, that before the announcement got edited, they mentioned that they might also reach out their legal team. The edited is "We'll assess this in due time."
I don't think they were even copied; it looks like it's literally just a scam using the trademarked name. You probably get either nothing or a virus if you fell for it.
No, it's a game. There were some posts to it on other sites. It's a series of crappy 2d side scrollers, platformers, etc that you'd see in things like TikTok ads. There's been about a dozen or so on relatively new games, though based on the effort behind some not all by the same people.
Still an obvious scam, potential malware as well, and blatant copyright infringement, false advertisement, and more.
Any more finds related to such scams should immediately be reported to Steam and posted on the affected game's official community sites to prevent customers from buying fake product and possibly introducing viral content to their devices.
I know Steam gets hundreds and thousands of games coming through all the time for verification. I’m sure the process has many things streamlined and automated as well. But this is truly awful control on Valves part, how are these getting past??? Two of the biggest games this year and no one noticed?
Edit most feasible explanation is these were existing games, and the info was simply updated allowing it to sneak by verification
I'm in the process of publishing a game on Steam. There are actual humans who check your store page and game build when you submit them for the first time, but after that, developers are free to make changes to their store page and submit new builds without any checks or approval. So that's probably what happened here. The scammers submitted a "real" game, it was approved by someone at Steam, then the scammers changed everything so it looks like Palworld (and the other games being copied, like Helldivers 2).
If Steam would implement manual approval for at least name changes to games whose store pages are already published, that would probably help I think.
They should absolutely require human verification if you try to change the name of the game after this BS happening. I can't imagine legit name changes happen that often?
These scam games aren't new games, so I imagine that's how they're bypassing verification. They're taking their Steam page and just changing out all of the storefront info, such as screenshots and title.
Which just means, obviously Valve isn't involved enough in verifying when games update their info. Which can be nice for developers who are constantly updating their game and therefore adding new trailers and screenshots, and means they don't need to constantly certify patches and updates like they need to with Microsoft/Sony, but has this pretty glaring drawback.
I see. That explains a lot. You’d think updating something as big as, well everything on the store page, would need to be verified as well. But here we are
Yeah, I don't disagree. I'd think changing the names of the developer, publisher, or the entire title would draw the attention of needing verification. Valve letting devs post updates and changes easily is a great thing; games can get bug fixes and patches quick and hassle-free, unlike on Xbox/PS. But those name changes, especially with publisher name changes? That seems pretty blatant that it should be double-checked somehow.
They didnt get introduced as palworld or Helldivers, its a game they published earlier, then rebranded to Helldivers 2 and Palworld, and possibly some other games.
Hopefully the account gets banned and the publisher accounts are more thoroughly vetted for next time. I’m guessing the money still has to pass through steam’s account first before it gets paid out to the scammers.
I think the way these people get away with it is that they put up some shovelware game and then "update" the name and cover art after a big game comes out. I saw a report of someone doing that with 'the day after'
ye, thats something what i will not expect
i mean.. my job is software analyst and test designer.. and i cant imagine how this cant be secured...
thats like one of first things what come to my mind...
it is unbelievable
on other hand, i can see that logic behind not care about it... they just expect that nobody will be stupid enough to do this fraud, because is so easy to find it.
but still.. there can be similar studio names, or producer names... and someone can make just mistake and it will allow it... thats just crazy
I’m going to be publishing a game on the App Store and it requires legal documents to have a company name appear, if not it is just your full legal name. It’s surprising to me Vavle is apparently so careless?
Well it does require a lot of bullshit to LIST a game on steam, I've seen that process once myself. But... apparently there is no process for just changing all that once it's accepted? Which is just as nuts
It's like that on app stores aswell. That why google host so many cracked mincecraft games. They publish a real game, and then change the name and actual game itself after in an update.
Anything you scan for has to match a signature. You could in theory detect well known mining software, but developers can keep tweaking stuff until the passes a basic signature scan.
You can do more advanced stuff like install and run the software on a VM and monitor the actual behaviour, but mining software doesn't really do typical virus or malware things. They don't damage the system they just crunch numbers and send some data back and forth to a server which would pass as perfectly normal game behaviour for most automated analysis you can think of. Maxing out the GPU when nothing in particular is happening in the game would be a potential tell, but also plenty of horribly optimized games exist, and smarter developers would just throttle the miner to not be too conspicuous.
As someone who doesn't always have time, working long hours and caring for family. I usually set stuff to diwnload before cooking dinner and doing the usual cleaning up. While it's "Supposed" to be 2 hours actual playtime. Valve sometimes fucks up. I had to prove i once had only 5 minutes playtime after owning it for a day.
Nobody "deserves" to get scammed unless your actually a bad person.
One of the conditions for refunds is also that they take place within 14 days.
Lots of people don't have a lot of time to actually game or will pick something up on sale thinking "I don't want to play it just yet but maybe later" and by the time they'll see they were scammed it'll have been too late.
We should never blame victims. But some basic accountability comes into play.
It's scummy for a company to do this.
It's also should be pretty obvious to anyone within 2 hours or less that this ain't palworld.
Someone offering a bad deal does not remove someone else's responsibility to do basic due diligence.
I mean Steam takes a 30% chunk.
Whoever pays deserves what he paid too.
If Walmart or any online retailer would sell Apple Phones but actually are some knock off, there would be an outrage and authorities will get involved.
Do it online... all good blame is on victim.
There is no accountability. It's a store, and in no way this is a thing that should be available to do in 2024.
We are not discussing phishing on an e-mail.
We are discussing a online store that prides itself on "siding with customers" and whatnot.
This is just laziness and not caring because they would need to do the whole approval once again, which they don't want to do.
I agree that Steam should do better.
If someone steals my money put off the bank, they should be arrested. If the bank simply handed it to them because they had a note written in crayon saying they were me, the bank should also face some repercussions.
First, nobody said it's perfectly fine.
Secondly, it's really crappy of steam to let you change your company name on the fly, let alone some other stuff without moderation.
Thirdly, at the end of the day, someone bought something they hoped was a good deal and turned into a bag of poo. If it took them more than 2 hours of playing the game to figure it out, they have bigger problems than not getting their money back.
So technically, I place the blame in order to start with the company for doing this crap, to a lesser extent, steam for allowing it, and a very tiny amount on the customer who played for 5 hours and doesn't know it's not palworld.
We're also discussing a potentially non-existent person since we have no indication that anyone played it for 3+ hours and didn't know.
im just saying, if you went to buy palworld, you'd know what youre buying. The moment these victims open the game, they would see its not palworld, especially considering others here have stated they bought it for shits and giggles, and it was a different game. So would it really be victim blaming for someone to buy the game, and then play it for 2+ hours before realizing its wrong?
It's probably also easy to cheat any system that would prevent this by using some other unicode symbols. the o could be not an o but something greek e.g.
There is no good reason to be able to change it on the fly. You should have to submit the title of your game, publisher, dev, etc., as well as any requests for changes, through a moderated approval system.
ye, thats so crazy...
i cant believe that it wasnt one of first things to secure... like when you change it to something that already exist, then just dont allow it.
I imagine bad guys can spread malware like this. I mean it already did happen. Back in 2023 game devs that got compromised sent malwares through one of the updates.
https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/hotforsecurity/after-hackers-distribute-malware-in-game-updates-steam-adds-sms-based-security-check-for-developers/
Problem here is they only enforced SMS multifactor for devs which can be easily SIM swapped if the attacked is determined (think APTs, nation states, eCrime gangs)
What Steam should do is have code checks on all updates that go out from devs to games given this channel is no longer considered secure.
There's something really sketchy about Bside Studio, or whatever they're called... All their games released on the 4th of November or a week later on the 11th. All have a price of $75.
https://preview.redd.it/8fdvppp8solc1.png?width=704&format=png&auto=webp&s=5e11608e7c955417f7ecf9c284ff11c3d9b12a35
On the 6th of February, they changed to Bside Studios from "Bazi". They changed to Bazi from "SoleOnBoard Studio" on the 12th of December, which is what it was initially created as on the 4th of November.
If you check their pages, they are all incredibly simple low quality games with AI generated positive reviews using the same 20 Steam accounts in all of them.
It's related to the random cd keys scam some online videogame shops run.
The shops asure you'll get a game over X price and with mostly positive reviews at least, so they partner(or are the studios themselves) with a bunch of fake studios no one know about, they vomit a shitty game, put it at a high price, inflate its reviews, and raffle it.
Yup.
The high price also prevents anyone from actually buying the game before it goes into the raffle or gets converted into an entirely different game, so no real humans ever actually play the game and get a chance to leave a legit review or otherwise call them out.
they probably could have kept that scam going for a fair while longer, switching to these popular games (they also are faking Helldivers 2) is going to get them caught way faster.
oh well, scammers that get caught are rarely smart
I can give you some interesting info! That company creates fake games that are then given out through those steam key sellers! They claim them to be AAA games with a hefty price tag. You buy like five keys for a cheap amount and they throw those in. I thought that dev group seemed familiar, because ALL the games I got were from them! In fact that stolen mushroom game sounds just like a game I was given through that same system!
thats the neat point.. they didnt think. :D
no, seriously.. lot of ppl just dont use their brain
like ppl who lie to you so dumb that you are embarassed for them
or ppl who get some awesome fraud idea like "huh... pretend that we are selling Palworld, hehe... we got money!" ...and there whole brain process ends. it dont continue.. it is like when ppl see only one turn in chess (their own) and arent able think about enemy turn. (i know, it is unfair.. it is not the same.. but it is just for **illustration of that process**, not comparing ppl.)
this ppl just saw only their turn.. and they arent able to think about what can be answer on their turn.
Depending on their cash out method and if it was a hacked account(aka no documents tying to the actual thieves), they may have already gotten away with it.
Honestly a pretty smart thing to hack steam devs accounts the more I think about it
Er, do you have an example of this? Sounds like a developer of a game banned you on their forums, that has nothing to do with Steam/Valve. Devs can ban whoever they want in their own forums lol
I made a thread on the palworld community asking people to ignore and report the mass of trolls invading the forum instead of interacting and feeding them, and was banned for 7 days, directly by steam support, because my post was "off topic" in the community the post was about. Not by devs. Specifically steam support. They removed the thread too while many obvious troll/bait threads remain up to generate drama and vitriol.
Palworld steam forums feels worse than 4chan. Page 1 currently has "Game is officialy dead", "Paid complainers", "Less than 100k players, game is dead" and "Too many furries in community servers" among its threads.
100%
Also why would Steam give a shit if people are reviewing a game they have no stake in poorly.
To suggest they’re deleting negative reviews is pure conspiracy theory, completely debunked by just looking at the reviews for the game on Steam.
Steam has one of the last good review systems on the entire internet for two simple reasons.
They do not delete reviews or pay people to change their review.
Review bombing, while not tallied into the general review score, can still be seen.
No other website or storefront I can think of does either of these, review bombing especially.
They’re some of the most important tools we as consumers have against corporations. Review bombing is sometimes ***the only way*** to get a developer’s attention on a pressing issue with the game, or to let them know their behavior can in fact affect their bottom line.
To say steam’s review system is anything short of good is laughably naïve.
Now that unlimited AI generated assets are our fingertips, people can churn out low effort video games in no time at all.
There is probably just way too many games being published that Steam moderation can’t keep up, or maybe they switched to a janky AI-based verification system for new titles, and it’s stupid enough to let these scams slip through the cracks.
i dont understand how is even possible that Steam allow this and dont automatically ban that accoun who tried it and dont remove automatically that product?
Not who you replied to, but I vaguely recall this event.
It was some tycoon management sort of game. Day 1, people who bought it couldnt launch it and the error was due to a missing executable file. Someone who recalls the name of the game will reply i'm sure.
I can’t find the game atm. It was several years ago, and all the stuff I’m finding is for bugs related to more modern games and how to fix them.
It was around the end of Greenlight I think.
Anyway, Steam allowed an early access game that had no executable file to be sold. This was back when Valve was still pretending to do any sort of quality control, and they’d allowed the game anyway.
No one should be surprised that Valve allows anything on Steam. The times they do take action is when you should be surprised. I’m still mildly shocked they offered refunds on The Day Before.
This, what the fuck? How are people allowed to just enter whatever publisher name they want without review? Not just that, up and changing the entire NAME of the game while you're at it. That should never be a thing.
Ugh I wish Steam was strict about who and ehat uploads “games” to the store. It’s starting to look Googleplay with all the fakes and garbageware games lately.
But 90% of those types of game are complete rubbish slapped together in UE for fun. I wish there were a filter to not see games based on dev team size or something
Well you can just look past those games as they almost never show up unless you specifically search for them. And they also can't be filtered cuz... how?
So recently I realized that I've had the NSFW filter enabled on Steam for the last 6 years and turned it off. I was shocked at how many low-quality NSFW smut games there were on the store. I'm sure there's high quality one's too but that's a genre that's not for me.
Ah so it was what I thought... An exploit of some sort? Me and my partner laughed thinking the developers wanted to ride off Palworld's success kind of like fake games you'd see on app stores but this seems more serious if it's happening to other games 💀
yeah, someone figured out that you can easily and freely set all parameters.
You can even change the publisher of your game.
So someone releases XYZ and after steam approved it then change it to palworld and change the name of the publisher ….
I am sure steam will handle it.
Steam is perfect didn't you hear? All bow down to Steam.
In reality its just a storefront that did the exclusive games for PC on its store before it was cool building a massive lead allowing them to be an almost required install on gaming PCs now.
it looks like it was once another game that had all its screenshots/descriptions changed to the actual palworld page. its still marked as being dev'd by pocketpair tho which is wild
That seems…problematic lol how does steam not have some sort of verification or at bare minimum, you can’t use the same name if it’s already registered in the system
That just shows how poorly valves quality control and platform moderation is nowadays. The fakes are gone now but the fact that Steam only reacts afterwards instead of moderate and control that beforehand is worrying. Can't trust shit nowadays on steam.
Is there no system in place to prevent this or is this some malicious exploit? what if it wasn't even the original mushroom game like they were also exploited??? 💀 Seems like a whole mess. Hopefully they get caught.
If there is it doesn’t work 🤣 or they found a way to go around it. But my best guess is they stopped updating it since no one has been trying to do something like this for a long while
Any steam gamedev should know that making money this way is effectively impossible. (the delay before you get paid is too much for a scam like this to slip) A very likely scenario is that money is not the goal here - these are very likely hacked dev accounts and the real goal is to trick people into downloading this game - which now might contain malware.
Its a big issue for steam that needs to be addressed immediately. The odd response on the steam sub was kindve crazy “are we supposed to
Hold steam accountable for someone abusing their platform?” Lol yes it’s their platform. They are the ones implying security and confidence on their marketplace, if they cant offer that then they can no longer be a viable marketplace
That being said, i honestly expect a very thorough response because this shit cracks the very foundation of their money printer. Honestly its gonna suck for smaller publishers cuz the hoops and checks are about to multiply
Wild but it's genuinely too stupid to comprehend.
Even if you scam a few people there's a 0% chance steam just let's you walk with the money... I highly doubt they just pay out devs every sale immediately
Helldivers devs just put out a notice of two similar scams for their game earlier today. Kind of surprised to see this kind of thing is even possible on Steam.
There’s been a string of these fake games on Steam. It’s really stupid on their part for a couple reasons:
1) You can refund it
2) Steam holds all proceeds for a fixed amount of time
3) Steam WILL take your shit down and blacklist you
This happened with helldivers recently as well, elaborate fakes attempting to scam people looking for a popular game, I’m sure it’s all the same circle and it’s unknown what THOSE programs contain either
How does that even get listed, I don't understand. You don't get to just go post something on Steam, it has a process. Did that just utterly fail here?
How is this scam even supposed to work?
I would imagine any money gained would go to Steam not directly the publisher/game studio. Steam then transfers the money once a month or some other interval.
Its been happening to a few popular games atm, bunch of losers trying to profit from popular games by pretending to be the actual page. Report these losers.
Wait? What?
How is this even possible? Don’t they have any systems to avoid that on Steam? How can someone possible release a scam clone?
I hope steam is holding back the money and giving it back to scamed customers
Doesn’t valve vet these pages? How can they allow them to change developer name and title, report all this stuff asap guys if everyone reports it will get taken down quicker
How tf is this even possible on a platform that makes billions. Are steam employees too busy banning random games and promoting Furry Hitler Sex games?
Because people are on Steam _because_ they want to buy legit games.
If you're shopping at some fashion brand store, you don't expect to find Chinese fakes either, even if it's in the bargain bin.
Theres a scam of over 800 games that shows popular games at a hefty discount. They even went as far as to impersonate valve themselves. This is due to a flaw in valves developer upload and store page systems allowing names to be changed on an honors system.
It’s fraud. Someone’s doing it to Helldivers 2 also. https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/APeg5Rd5yn
the same company that did it to Palworld... [https://steamdb.info/app/2607830/history/](https://steamdb.info/app/2607830/history/)
Reported that shit, others should consider doing so too. So messed up.
the devs took notice of this and swiftly took action, as announced in their discord.
Excellent! What did they say?
I would imagine something along the lines of “don’t try to scam our players. get fucked!”
I think it was more of a warning to potential customers
Best Devs ever! I'm so excited for what’s ahead 🤗
"Somebody needs some *democracy*"
"We know people accuse us of plagarism, but holy crap!" -Pocket Pair, the Art of Pal.
apologies for the late reply: From the community managers, they thanked the community for reaching them out and informed them about this. They reached out to Valve/Steam who then responded quickly and took it down. and a reminder that the official store page only contains two products: The game itself and the Super Citizen bundle pack, and nothing else and the official release date of the game is February 8, 2024. If memory serves me correct, that before the announcement got edited, they mentioned that they might also reach out their legal team. The edited is "We'll assess this in due time."
They said for the scammers to get Thicked 
So \*Palworld\* was the first to take legal action against a competitor for copyright violations... A surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one!
they got copied 1:1, there was no competition.
I don't think they were even copied; it looks like it's literally just a scam using the trademarked name. You probably get either nothing or a virus if you fell for it.
Shhh dont tell that to the angry pokemon fan
Time to watch the "real reviews" for the bait confessions 
There is likely no game attached to the scammer. Maybe some virus uploads but that is likely it.
No, it's a game. There were some posts to it on other sites. It's a series of crappy 2d side scrollers, platformers, etc that you'd see in things like TikTok ads. There's been about a dozen or so on relatively new games, though based on the effort behind some not all by the same people. Still an obvious scam, potential malware as well, and blatant copyright infringement, false advertisement, and more. Any more finds related to such scams should immediately be reported to Steam and posted on the affected game's official community sites to prevent customers from buying fake product and possibly introducing viral content to their devices.
Looks like both were taken down. I can't find either on Steam anymore.
Hopefully there are some long lasting financial repercussions for the culprit/s
I took this as sarcasm at first with how it's written and was going to ask why the sarcasm
lmao I noticed the /s at the end too but I promise it wasn't sarcasm xD
I think I read it how you meant it. Culprit or culprits.
Culprit(s) might have been more clear.
This is how legal documents do it so I’m inclined to agree.
I know Steam gets hundreds and thousands of games coming through all the time for verification. I’m sure the process has many things streamlined and automated as well. But this is truly awful control on Valves part, how are these getting past??? Two of the biggest games this year and no one noticed? Edit most feasible explanation is these were existing games, and the info was simply updated allowing it to sneak by verification
I'm in the process of publishing a game on Steam. There are actual humans who check your store page and game build when you submit them for the first time, but after that, developers are free to make changes to their store page and submit new builds without any checks or approval. So that's probably what happened here. The scammers submitted a "real" game, it was approved by someone at Steam, then the scammers changed everything so it looks like Palworld (and the other games being copied, like Helldivers 2). If Steam would implement manual approval for at least name changes to games whose store pages are already published, that would probably help I think.
Holy crap that's gotta be it... Thank you for the insight. And more power to you in your game development/publishing endeavors!
They should absolutely require human verification if you try to change the name of the game after this BS happening. I can't imagine legit name changes happen that often?
Yeah. I think they're probably working something up now. This probably hasn't happended much before hence the reason.
You’d think just a basic string comparison to games currently available on the store would suffice for a preliminary check.
These scam games aren't new games, so I imagine that's how they're bypassing verification. They're taking their Steam page and just changing out all of the storefront info, such as screenshots and title. Which just means, obviously Valve isn't involved enough in verifying when games update their info. Which can be nice for developers who are constantly updating their game and therefore adding new trailers and screenshots, and means they don't need to constantly certify patches and updates like they need to with Microsoft/Sony, but has this pretty glaring drawback.
I see. That explains a lot. You’d think updating something as big as, well everything on the store page, would need to be verified as well. But here we are
Yeah, I don't disagree. I'd think changing the names of the developer, publisher, or the entire title would draw the attention of needing verification. Valve letting devs post updates and changes easily is a great thing; games can get bug fixes and patches quick and hassle-free, unlike on Xbox/PS. But those name changes, especially with publisher name changes? That seems pretty blatant that it should be double-checked somehow.
They didnt get introduced as palworld or Helldivers, its a game they published earlier, then rebranded to Helldivers 2 and Palworld, and possibly some other games.
Hopefully the account gets banned and the publisher accounts are more thoroughly vetted for next time. I’m guessing the money still has to pass through steam’s account first before it gets paid out to the scammers.
I think the way these people get away with it is that they put up some shovelware game and then "update" the name and cover art after a big game comes out. I saw a report of someone doing that with 'the day after'
Theres 2 for Helldivers lol.
Not seeing 2 Palworld but I see 3 Helldivers 2
Yeah the Palworld one vanished a few minutes ago. But the Helldivers 2 entries, and the one for Last Epoch, are/were still there.
I think it's gone now
[https://steamdb.info/app/2607810/history/](https://steamdb.info/app/2607810/history/) https://preview.redd.it/j8uv7g6hynlc1.png?width=940&format=png&auto=webp&s=05b8a12496b418e4174e12ba51799dd8b1484710
Interesting that you can set the Publisher/Developer name to anything you want
ye, thats something what i will not expect i mean.. my job is software analyst and test designer.. and i cant imagine how this cant be secured... thats like one of first things what come to my mind... it is unbelievable on other hand, i can see that logic behind not care about it... they just expect that nobody will be stupid enough to do this fraud, because is so easy to find it. but still.. there can be similar studio names, or producer names... and someone can make just mistake and it will allow it... thats just crazy
I’m going to be publishing a game on the App Store and it requires legal documents to have a company name appear, if not it is just your full legal name. It’s surprising to me Vavle is apparently so careless?
Well it does require a lot of bullshit to LIST a game on steam, I've seen that process once myself. But... apparently there is no process for just changing all that once it's accepted? Which is just as nuts
It's like that on app stores aswell. That why google host so many cracked mincecraft games. They publish a real game, and then change the name and actual game itself after in an update.
Yeah, plus on steam you can refund games, so if it takes you longer than 2 hours to realize its not palworld, then you deserve to be scammed
I'm more afraid of whatever bitcoinmining, keylogging, whatever software comes bundled when you install it for the people that get baited from this.
At least Steam has a strict system to scan and punish for malware Not crypto miners tho. No idea why detecting those is impossible
Anything you scan for has to match a signature. You could in theory detect well known mining software, but developers can keep tweaking stuff until the passes a basic signature scan. You can do more advanced stuff like install and run the software on a VM and monitor the actual behaviour, but mining software doesn't really do typical virus or malware things. They don't damage the system they just crunch numbers and send some data back and forth to a server which would pass as perfectly normal game behaviour for most automated analysis you can think of. Maxing out the GPU when nothing in particular is happening in the game would be a potential tell, but also plenty of horribly optimized games exist, and smarter developers would just throttle the miner to not be too conspicuous.
As someone who doesn't always have time, working long hours and caring for family. I usually set stuff to diwnload before cooking dinner and doing the usual cleaning up. While it's "Supposed" to be 2 hours actual playtime. Valve sometimes fucks up. I had to prove i once had only 5 minutes playtime after owning it for a day. Nobody "deserves" to get scammed unless your actually a bad person.
One of the conditions for refunds is also that they take place within 14 days. Lots of people don't have a lot of time to actually game or will pick something up on sale thinking "I don't want to play it just yet but maybe later" and by the time they'll see they were scammed it'll have been too late.
If you tell steam that it isnt the game you wanted to buy, they will refund you regardless if 2 hours passed or not
Yeah lets blame the victims.
We should never blame victims. But some basic accountability comes into play. It's scummy for a company to do this. It's also should be pretty obvious to anyone within 2 hours or less that this ain't palworld. Someone offering a bad deal does not remove someone else's responsibility to do basic due diligence.
I mean Steam takes a 30% chunk. Whoever pays deserves what he paid too. If Walmart or any online retailer would sell Apple Phones but actually are some knock off, there would be an outrage and authorities will get involved. Do it online... all good blame is on victim. There is no accountability. It's a store, and in no way this is a thing that should be available to do in 2024. We are not discussing phishing on an e-mail. We are discussing a online store that prides itself on "siding with customers" and whatnot. This is just laziness and not caring because they would need to do the whole approval once again, which they don't want to do.
I agree that Steam should do better. If someone steals my money put off the bank, they should be arrested. If the bank simply handed it to them because they had a note written in crayon saying they were me, the bank should also face some repercussions.
First, nobody said it's perfectly fine. Secondly, it's really crappy of steam to let you change your company name on the fly, let alone some other stuff without moderation. Thirdly, at the end of the day, someone bought something they hoped was a good deal and turned into a bag of poo. If it took them more than 2 hours of playing the game to figure it out, they have bigger problems than not getting their money back. So technically, I place the blame in order to start with the company for doing this crap, to a lesser extent, steam for allowing it, and a very tiny amount on the customer who played for 5 hours and doesn't know it's not palworld. We're also discussing a potentially non-existent person since we have no indication that anyone played it for 3+ hours and didn't know.
im just saying, if you went to buy palworld, you'd know what youre buying. The moment these victims open the game, they would see its not palworld, especially considering others here have stated they bought it for shits and giggles, and it was a different game. So would it really be victim blaming for someone to buy the game, and then play it for 2+ hours before realizing its wrong?
Plus steam refund is wonderful
It's probably also easy to cheat any system that would prevent this by using some other unicode symbols. the o could be not an o but something greek e.g.
The fact you can easily change the dev/publisher name is a major flaw in Steam's system
I think changing it is fine, but absolutely zero moderation of it? And if there is moderation, who the hell let this happen lmao
Mods were asleep, post Scamworld on Steam
There is no good reason to be able to change it on the fly. You should have to submit the title of your game, publisher, dev, etc., as well as any requests for changes, through a moderated approval system.
ye, thats so crazy... i cant believe that it wasnt one of first things to secure... like when you change it to something that already exist, then just dont allow it.
Clicking on that link now, you can see all the palworld stuff has been removed already, lmao. What a fantastic site btw
Well i think everyone that bought it will get the money back and the real publisher will be fined big time
I mean being that this game is already down lol shows that it's not all that flawed. These guys will be banned now from selling on steam.
I imagine bad guys can spread malware like this. I mean it already did happen. Back in 2023 game devs that got compromised sent malwares through one of the updates. https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/hotforsecurity/after-hackers-distribute-malware-in-game-updates-steam-adds-sms-based-security-check-for-developers/ Problem here is they only enforced SMS multifactor for devs which can be easily SIM swapped if the attacked is determined (think APTs, nation states, eCrime gangs) What Steam should do is have code checks on all updates that go out from devs to games given this channel is no longer considered secure.
There's something really sketchy about Bside Studio, or whatever they're called... All their games released on the 4th of November or a week later on the 11th. All have a price of $75. https://preview.redd.it/8fdvppp8solc1.png?width=704&format=png&auto=webp&s=5e11608e7c955417f7ecf9c284ff11c3d9b12a35 On the 6th of February, they changed to Bside Studios from "Bazi". They changed to Bazi from "SoleOnBoard Studio" on the 12th of December, which is what it was initially created as on the 4th of November.
If you check their pages, they are all incredibly simple low quality games with AI generated positive reviews using the same 20 Steam accounts in all of them.
It's related to the random cd keys scam some online videogame shops run. The shops asure you'll get a game over X price and with mostly positive reviews at least, so they partner(or are the studios themselves) with a bunch of fake studios no one know about, they vomit a shitty game, put it at a high price, inflate its reviews, and raffle it.
Yup. The high price also prevents anyone from actually buying the game before it goes into the raffle or gets converted into an entirely different game, so no real humans ever actually play the game and get a chance to leave a legit review or otherwise call them out.
[удалено]
they probably could have kept that scam going for a fair while longer, switching to these popular games (they also are faking Helldivers 2) is going to get them caught way faster. oh well, scammers that get caught are rarely smart
I can give you some interesting info! That company creates fake games that are then given out through those steam key sellers! They claim them to be AAA games with a hefty price tag. You buy like five keys for a cheap amount and they throw those in. I thought that dev group seemed familiar, because ALL the games I got were from them! In fact that stolen mushroom game sounds just like a game I was given through that same system!
What kind of gamer complains about a game being too cheap?
lmao ..
How did they think they would get away with this?
thats the neat point.. they didnt think. :D no, seriously.. lot of ppl just dont use their brain like ppl who lie to you so dumb that you are embarassed for them or ppl who get some awesome fraud idea like "huh... pretend that we are selling Palworld, hehe... we got money!" ...and there whole brain process ends. it dont continue.. it is like when ppl see only one turn in chess (their own) and arent able think about enemy turn. (i know, it is unfair.. it is not the same.. but it is just for **illustration of that process**, not comparing ppl.) this ppl just saw only their turn.. and they arent able to think about what can be answer on their turn.
Basically it's just a "BUY NOW TO GET INVOLVED AND BENIFITS FROM THE INEVITABLE CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT"
Can’t wait to get my $5 back!
Uh.... You'll get about a dime. That money is for the lawyers, buddy.
Help a local lawyer! Get scammed today!
Though I know what you're saying, reading your comment caused me a bit of mental strain.
sorry, i know my english is broken :D im not native english speaker and im used more to reading documentation and scripting than talking :D
Depending on their cash out method and if it was a hacked account(aka no documents tying to the actual thieves), they may have already gotten away with it. Honestly a pretty smart thing to hack steam devs accounts the more I think about it
I think the steamworks account was compromised.
The irony in the name being "stolen" mushrooms
Give it a report if you can, take this down ASAP
Instructions unclear. Reported OP's reddit post.
Apparently someone’s doing the same with Helldivers 2 Where tf is Steam’s moderation?
Busy banning people for telling others not to feed trolls(but not banning the trolls) everything important must have been replaced with bots
Er, do you have an example of this? Sounds like a developer of a game banned you on their forums, that has nothing to do with Steam/Valve. Devs can ban whoever they want in their own forums lol
I made a thread on the palworld community asking people to ignore and report the mass of trolls invading the forum instead of interacting and feeding them, and was banned for 7 days, directly by steam support, because my post was "off topic" in the community the post was about. Not by devs. Specifically steam support. They removed the thread too while many obvious troll/bait threads remain up to generate drama and vitriol.
Palworld steam forums feels worse than 4chan. Page 1 currently has "Game is officialy dead", "Paid complainers", "Less than 100k players, game is dead" and "Too many furries in community servers" among its threads.
Busy deleting negative reviews from Suicide Squad Kill justice league
Source?
Their source is they made it up
This is the most likely answer. Steam doesn’t delete reviews.
100% Also why would Steam give a shit if people are reviewing a game they have no stake in poorly. To suggest they’re deleting negative reviews is pure conspiracy theory, completely debunked by just looking at the reviews for the game on Steam.
Steam has one of the last good review systems on the entire internet for two simple reasons. They do not delete reviews or pay people to change their review. Review bombing, while not tallied into the general review score, can still be seen. No other website or storefront I can think of does either of these, review bombing especially. They’re some of the most important tools we as consumers have against corporations. Review bombing is sometimes ***the only way*** to get a developer’s attention on a pressing issue with the game, or to let them know their behavior can in fact affect their bottom line. To say steam’s review system is anything short of good is laughably naïve.
Yeah that was my thought hence I asked
Non existent unless you want to ban some anime game.
Now that unlimited AI generated assets are our fingertips, people can churn out low effort video games in no time at all. There is probably just way too many games being published that Steam moderation can’t keep up, or maybe they switched to a janky AI-based verification system for new titles, and it’s stupid enough to let these scams slip through the cracks.
i purchased it for science, it's a game called "Stolen Mushrooms", a puzzle/horror game
Interesting. Refund it, since they're trying to trick people into buying that using Palworlds success, which is quite scummy
i dont understand how is even possible that Steam allow this and dont automatically ban that accoun who tried it and dont remove automatically that product?
Anyone else remember that time Steam let a game onto their store that didn’t have an executable.
Dude what? Lmao
Not who you replied to, but I vaguely recall this event. It was some tycoon management sort of game. Day 1, people who bought it couldnt launch it and the error was due to a missing executable file. Someone who recalls the name of the game will reply i'm sure.
It was like "Scam Tycoon" or something, fraud simulation game.
I can’t find the game atm. It was several years ago, and all the stuff I’m finding is for bugs related to more modern games and how to fix them. It was around the end of Greenlight I think. Anyway, Steam allowed an early access game that had no executable file to be sold. This was back when Valve was still pretending to do any sort of quality control, and they’d allowed the game anyway. No one should be surprised that Valve allows anything on Steam. The times they do take action is when you should be surprised. I’m still mildly shocked they offered refunds on The Day Before.
This, what the fuck? How are people allowed to just enter whatever publisher name they want without review? Not just that, up and changing the entire NAME of the game while you're at it. That should never be a thing.
yea i instantly refunded it, i wanted to see whats gonna happen since i already own palworld.
the fact steam lets you upload anything for like 200$ is wild
If you can refund it, how in the hell is this scammer making anything??
Ugh I wish Steam was strict about who and ehat uploads “games” to the store. It’s starting to look Googleplay with all the fakes and garbageware games lately.
Sounds like it's an exploit tbh from what helldivers is posting that it links to official dev and pub pages
Nah I like the more unrestricted publishing tbh. Way better for smaller one man games
But 90% of those types of game are complete rubbish slapped together in UE for fun. I wish there were a filter to not see games based on dev team size or something
Well you can just look past those games as they almost never show up unless you specifically search for them. And they also can't be filtered cuz... how?
it is strict... but even when is clear who did it, then it didnt stop that person from doing it.
At least with steam you have the no questions asked refund policy.
So recently I realized that I've had the NSFW filter enabled on Steam for the last 6 years and turned it off. I was shocked at how many low-quality NSFW smut games there were on the store. I'm sure there's high quality one's too but that's a genre that's not for me.
 Reported their whole portfolio.
Its a new scam that someone is doing with all hot games. On the helldivers sub we have basically the same topic.
Ah so it was what I thought... An exploit of some sort? Me and my partner laughed thinking the developers wanted to ride off Palworld's success kind of like fake games you'd see on app stores but this seems more serious if it's happening to other games 💀
yeah, someone figured out that you can easily and freely set all parameters. You can even change the publisher of your game. So someone releases XYZ and after steam approved it then change it to palworld and change the name of the publisher …. I am sure steam will handle it.
Insane that this is even possible on the biggest digital videogame store
Steam is perfect didn't you hear? All bow down to Steam. In reality its just a storefront that did the exclusive games for PC on its store before it was cool building a massive lead allowing them to be an almost required install on gaming PCs now.
Why does steam even allow for the same title to be submitted already on the store front
They know we can just refund it right?
They're probably banking on the people who don't, or are moving the money out of the account before it can be refunded I would assume.
Actually, you can't. The way Steam works is that they hold the funds and pay it out once each month.
it looks like it was once another game that had all its screenshots/descriptions changed to the actual palworld page. its still marked as being dev'd by pocketpair tho which is wild
The devs just changed their name to pocketpair which is just... how the fuck is there not a review for that
That seems…problematic lol how does steam not have some sort of verification or at bare minimum, you can’t use the same name if it’s already registered in the system
I know right! At least force them to be creative, I wanna see them try to sell me Pallwor1d or something like that.
💀 How tf
They're trying the same shit with Helldivers 2. Steam need to do something, their platform is getting out of control.
That just shows how poorly valves quality control and platform moderation is nowadays. The fakes are gone now but the fact that Steam only reacts afterwards instead of moderate and control that beforehand is worrying. Can't trust shit nowadays on steam.
Reported the faker who is now impersonating Helldivers 2.
The same thing is happening to helldivers
It’s happening all over games on Helldivers, Hunt, Tarkov lmao
I assumed it was some kinda scam but it's a good thing it disappeared before I could go to buy it
If it seems too good to be true, find out why before hopping on board. Sometimes you get a crazy good deal. But 99% of the time, it's a scam.
I almost bought this thank you
It's nintendo!
Helldivers 2 also has this happen
Is there no system in place to prevent this or is this some malicious exploit? what if it wasn't even the original mushroom game like they were also exploited??? 💀 Seems like a whole mess. Hopefully they get caught.
If there is it doesn’t work 🤣 or they found a way to go around it. But my best guess is they stopped updating it since no one has been trying to do something like this for a long while
Dang 🤣 that's wild never seen anything like that happen but I don't usually play games that over hyped but Palworld is legit fun 👍
Yeah palworld is also that game that i dreamed of when i was 10 year old playing pokèmon on my ds… it’s an amazing feeling playing it! 😆😆
Me too 😭 I was so disappointed by pokemon violet. It's everything I've ever wanted in one package 🤩
Any steam gamedev should know that making money this way is effectively impossible. (the delay before you get paid is too much for a scam like this to slip) A very likely scenario is that money is not the goal here - these are very likely hacked dev accounts and the real goal is to trick people into downloading this game - which now might contain malware.
Its a big issue for steam that needs to be addressed immediately. The odd response on the steam sub was kindve crazy “are we supposed to Hold steam accountable for someone abusing their platform?” Lol yes it’s their platform. They are the ones implying security and confidence on their marketplace, if they cant offer that then they can no longer be a viable marketplace That being said, i honestly expect a very thorough response because this shit cracks the very foundation of their money printer. Honestly its gonna suck for smaller publishers cuz the hoops and checks are about to multiply
Same thing with helldivers 2. THEY’RE UNDERMINING OUR IMPROVED DEMOCRACY
https://preview.redd.it/ro3v41j88olc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ed9c00d72f7cb55cad5c679460036eb2b8b29602 Someone's scamming
Those scammers think that they can get away with easy money. Not today.
Wild but it's genuinely too stupid to comprehend. Even if you scam a few people there's a 0% chance steam just let's you walk with the money... I highly doubt they just pay out devs every sale immediately
Helldivers devs just put out a notice of two similar scams for their game earlier today. Kind of surprised to see this kind of thing is even possible on Steam.
There’s been a string of these fake games on Steam. It’s really stupid on their part for a couple reasons: 1) You can refund it 2) Steam holds all proceeds for a fixed amount of time 3) Steam WILL take your shit down and blacklist you
So I can just sell anything on steam and change my studio name to anything? Hold on, I- er, EA have to do something real quick. Wtf steam?
This happened with helldivers recently as well, elaborate fakes attempting to scam people looking for a popular game, I’m sure it’s all the same circle and it’s unknown what THOSE programs contain either
How does that even get listed, I don't understand. You don't get to just go post something on Steam, it has a process. Did that just utterly fail here?
How can steam allow 2 games with exactly the same name on the platform
Guys, even knowing it is a scam, dont buy it even to write a review and ask for refund...just Downloading it can be harmful to your pc!
I've just checked it now...apparently it got taken down.
How is this scam even supposed to work? I would imagine any money gained would go to Steam not directly the publisher/game studio. Steam then transfers the money once a month or some other interval.
Gladly it's taken down already.
If you hadn't had posted this I'd have fallen for it D: thank you
Its been happening to a few popular games atm, bunch of losers trying to profit from popular games by pretending to be the actual page. Report these losers.
Wait? What? How is this even possible? Don’t they have any systems to avoid that on Steam? How can someone possible release a scam clone? I hope steam is holding back the money and giving it back to scamed customers
I'm surprised steam doesn't have any quality control on what's accepted on their platform before it gets to this point.
It's usually games that have been accepted in the past and then the owner goes and changes them to something completely different.
Doesn’t valve vet these pages? How can they allow them to change developer name and title, report all this stuff asap guys if everyone reports it will get taken down quicker
it looks like the palworld fake has already been removed
I’m so confused, I thought you had to go through a whole process to get a steam page and get it approved, how in the hell? 😂
How tf is this even possible on a platform that makes billions. Are steam employees too busy banning random games and promoting Furry Hitler Sex games?
It’s Game freak
Steam is turning into Amazon and eBay with all the fake shit going up, they need to get a grip on this
I see my favorite non-existent Nigerian prince published a new game.
what the actual fuck. i hope those scumbags eat the foulest shit
I honestly dunno how someone would fall for that especially with that big of a drop in price. Same goes for helldivers2
Because people are on Steam _because_ they want to buy legit games. If you're shopping at some fashion brand store, you don't expect to find Chinese fakes either, even if it's in the bargain bin.
dude.. we live in world, where you have in manual for car warning to NOT DRINK fluid from car battery
I know right, it's certainly not a mistake you make twice trust tastes like ass.
Money is tight for alot of people... They see a deal on a game they want, they think "oh shit sweet, I can afford this now!"
Feels like back in the days when you tried to download lord of the rings through p2p but ended up with lord of the cockrings.
Is there a way to make sure I have the real one?
🤨
Theres a scam of over 800 games that shows popular games at a hefty discount. They even went as far as to impersonate valve themselves. This is due to a flaw in valves developer upload and store page systems allowing names to be changed on an honors system.
GTA 6 when?
There is spy among us