Early this morning, a team alert was sent out from the busy Helldivers 2 discord. An imposter was threatening the integrity of Super Earth, as the developers of several games on Steam had changed the game's name to Helldivers 2 and completely altered the Steam page, including the developer and publisher tags. And Helldivers 2 was not the only target of this scam.

Palworld, Last Epoch, and Escape from Tarkov were also spoofed using the same technique, and the fakes on their respective Steam pages look almost legitimate to the casual observer. At first glance, only a very small number of reviews suggested that something was not quite right.

Although games from different studios were tampered with, the tampering took place at the same time and the modus operandi was the same, suggesting that the scam was most likely perpetrated by a single entity. Other games in these developers' catalogs share many similarities. They appear to be cheaply made asset flips, and all currently cost £39 or £49.

The developers in question use several different names. For example, the developer of Do Not Smile, which appeared briefly as Helldivers 2, was known as Whitehole Games until November, when it changed to Glamurny, and earlier this month to Fest Studios. whitehole/ Glamurny/Fest was also behind the fake Last Epoch.

Fest also created a fake "Escape from Tarkov" page that is not even on Steam. In other words, the first result of a Google search for "Escape from Tarkov Steam" is a scam.

Meanwhile, SoleOnBoard Studio, calling itself albobs and Bside Studio, was making fakes of Palworld and Helldivers 2. All of these fakes have been discontinued, but the remaining developers' games are still available. Hopefully, these developers will be banned from Steam, although I hate to call it that.

Valve was once heavily criticized for its heavy-handed approach to getting games onto Steam. It was very picky. Steam Greenlight, which was something of a pioneer in Early Access, opened its doors a bit in 2012, but is now completely open, turning Steam into the Wild West. With the sheer number of games available, discoverability is a nightmare and there is no real quality control. Asset flips and games that simply don't work, all of which are offered on Steam.

Especially problematic is how easy it was for these fake studios to pose as legitimate studios like Arrowhead. A few simple edits, a few links, a few official screenshots, and voila, a page that looks pretty genuine unless you actually scrutinize it. No wonder some customers fell for the scam.