What you need to know
- In the late hours of Thursday evening, two fake Helldivers 2 listings with discounted prices went up on Steam as scammers attempted to make money off the popularity of Arrowhead Game Studios' hit third-person co-op shooter.
- Luckily, Arrowhead was able to quickly work with Valve to address the situation, resulting in rapid takedowns of the store pages.
- Some digging in the SteamDB database and on Reddit indicates that the group(s) behind these listings have been flagged for scams by users for several months.
- Arrowhead says its "legal department is on it," and that it will "assess everything in due time." The studio has also reminded fans that if a Helldivers 2 listing doesn't show its release date as February 8, 2024, it's fake.
Though it doesn't happen often, it's not unheard of for nefarious actors to publish scam games on the Steam store or trick players into buying existing ones by renaming them to match a far more popular title. A case of the latter fraud occurred in the dead of night on Thursday evening, as the pages of two Steam games were edited to make them appear as if they were discounted listings for Helldivers 2.
Arrowhead Game Studios' new third-person PvE co-op shooter has been at the peak of Steam's Top Sellers chart for weeks, and evidently, someone wanted to take advantage of that popularity to try and make a quick buck. Fortunately, Arrowhead quickly realized what was going on, and was able to work with Steam developer Valve to get the fake listings removed. About an hour after these scam pages were spotted, they got taken down like Bile Titans caught in the blast of a 500kg bomb stratagem. Good riddance.
"All fake store pages now seem to have been taken down by Valve, who acted very swiftly after we reached out," wrote Arrowhead's community manager Thomas "Twinbeard" Petersson in an update on the official Helldivers 2 Discord. "We´ll assess everything in due time. Also, a big THANK YOU to everyone who DMed or pinged me/us about the fake pages and games. Together we stand."
Earlier in the evening, Petersson said that "our legal department is on it," so I'm sure action will be taken against the culprits in due time. Above all else, I'm just glad that Arrowhead and Valve were able to get this taken care of immediately, as the scammers were clearly waiting until late hours to try and pull off their scheme.
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Petersson also noted that you can tell which Helldivers 2 listings are real (here's the correct Steam page) by checking for the correct launch date: February 8, 2024. Additionally, make sure it's either simply Helldivers 2 or the Helldivers 2: Super Citizen Edition. "All remaining Helldivers 2 games are fake."
"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," he continued. "Again, the only two Helldivers 2 products we market are Helldivers 2 and Helldivers 2 Super Citizen Edition."
I did a little digging in the SteamDB database as I was writing this, and discovered that one of the fake Helldivers 2 listings was originally for a game developed by "SoleOnBoard Studio" called Figurality in which you were tasked with "controlling the mouse cursor" and guiding it "to the correct figure" (riveting). The other was DO NOT SMILE, a game from "Whitehole Games" described as "a 2D platformer with puzzle elements."
Steam users have had the latter group flagged as predatory for months, and there's no doubt in my mind that both "developers" are just the same band of scammers. It should go without saying, but if you see any games with these names attached to it, do not buy them.
In other, more positive Helldivers 2 news, hundreds of thousands of players are currently fighting to liberate the planet of Veld from a bug infestation before it spreads out of control Monday morning. Oh, and we recently learned that the game's got a special Game Master named Joel who's orchestrating the Galactic War, though his power has limits.
Helldivers 2 is available now for $39.99 on both PS5 and PC, and so far, it's one of the best PC games of the year. Notably, the game also supports cross-platform play between PS5 and PC.
