Two indie Steam games were disguised as Helldivers 2 to scam players

videogameschronicle.com:

Two indie games on Steam were disguised as Helldivers 2 earlier today, to scam players into buying them.

News started spreading on social media that two duplicate copies of Helldivers 2 had appeared on Steam, selling at discounted prices of $12.49 and $19.99.

According to SteamDB, however, both games were actually existing indie games, with all their metadata changed by the developer to imitate the Arrowhead Game Studios hit.

SteamDB’s history shows that both games were edited at 11.50pm ET / 4.50am GMT, with their titles, descriptions, screenshots and even publisher and developer information changed to match those of the real Helldivers 2.

In reality, the games were Figurality by SoleOnBoard Studio and Do Not Smile by Whitehole Games. Given that both games were released on November 4 and both were changed today, it seems likely that both ‘developers’ are the same person.

The games were been pulled from Steam as this article was being written, meaning they were up in their modified form for around three hours before they were spotted and delisted.

The fact they were even allowed to be changed, however, to the extent that the publisher name was able to be renamed ‘PlayStation PC LLC’ (and that clicking its name links to the legitimate PlayStation Steam page), will raise questions about how developers are able to do this on Steam.

Helldivers 2 (the real version) has been a huge success on Steam, at one point hitting a concurrent peak of 458,709 players.

Having resolved the server issues that players had been facing since the game’s release last month, Arrowhead boss Johan Pilestedt recently said the studio can now switch its attention to improving the title and working on new content.

“Now we have time to focus on improvements to the title and resume our original plan,” he said. “Many exciting things upcoming.”