Scammer stratagem
It’s a tale as old as time: when a great, popular game rises to the top of the Steam charts, scammers and chancers will do everything in their power to steal some of that glory for themselves. The latest victim isHelldivers 2, with scammers putting up two separate fake pages for it on Steam over the last 24 hours. Each page listed Arrowhead as the developer, and PlayStation as the publisher, along with big discounts of 50-75% off to tempt players into buying the cheap version instead of the real one.
Warnings about the fake pages surfaced onRedditearlier this morning, with Xwitter userWario64providing additional screengrabs of at least one of the Steam pages as well as their corresponding SteamDB update logs.
No, Helldivers 2 is not 75%/50% off on Steam. Someone else is using a different game and renaming it exactly like a Helldivers 2 listing as a scampic.twitter.com/NLy1uUoxd6
Valve have since scrubbed the fake pages from Steam. The same Reddit thread also suggests that fellow Steam mega hitPalworldhad a similarly fake Steam page as of yesterday, though a quick search of the Steam store now suggests that this, too, seems to have been taken down now.
According to our friends atEurogamer, developers Arrowhead have alerted players in their Discord, urging them to be mindful of any further fake pages.
“People posting as us trying to scam people is obviously very sad and frustrating, and for that as well as for security reasons we urge you to stay clear of them,” said Arrowhead’s community manager. “Again, the only two Helldivers 2 products we market are Helldivers 2 and Helldivers 2 Super Citizen Edition.”
It’s a sorry state of affairs, and one of the dangers of Valve being so hands-off with how Steam is run. Arrowhead went on to say that Valve responded “very swiftly” once alerted, but it’s clear there’s still more that can be done to try and crack down on this nonsense. While it’s perhaps unreasonable to expect Valve to approve each and every store page change in order to help prevent circumstances like this from happening again, I do think it’s reasonable to have at least some safeguards in place to protect developers against such obvious scam attempts.
Helldivers 2 (the real one) is available onSteamfor £35/€40/$40. It earned a Bestest Best from our Ed in hisHelldivers 2 review, where he said its “Impeccable action and clever details make this a rare breed of live service co-op shooter”.
