Fake Steam copies of Helldivers 2, Palworld play havoc as players left scammed

Helldivers 2 launched last month and is already one of the most successful titles this year. As such, it’s no surprise that it has games trying to copy it. Unfortunately, some games are doing this in more blatant ways than others: Yesterday, on Mar. 1, two indie games disguised themselves as Helldivers 2 on Steam to scam players into buying them, changing all their details, including their metadata, to replicate Helldivers 2 to trick players into buying them. 

“People posting as us trying to scam people is obviously very sad and frustrating,” said Helldivers 2 community manager Twinbeard, “and for that as well as for security reasons we urge you to stay clear of them. Again, the only two Helldivers 2 products we market are Helldivers 2 and Helldivers 2 Super Citizen Edition. (I haven’t had time to check the details on the fake store pages yet since I just got up.)”

The fake Helldivers 2 listings have since been taken down by Valve following a recent update. However, it seems the issue was not exclusive to Helldivers 2. Palworld community manager Bucky stated on X that two similar listings appeared for Palworld but have since been taken down after the devs emailed Valve.

“We had 2 pop up for Palworld today, got them taken down almost immediately when we emailed Steam.” Said Bucky, “they aren’t new apps, basically, they take an app id of their existing game and just swap the name and pictures to that of yours. In our case, both games were small Russian games.”

The fake listings for Helldivers 2 were live for about three hours before they were taken down. The games changed to Helldivers 2 listings were Figurality by SoleOnBoard Studio and Do Not Smile by Whitehole Games. Both games were released on Nov. 4 but their details were both changed yesterday. 

Additionally, according to a recent Reddit thread, the game players received instead of Palworld when the fake listings were up was a puzzle game called Stolen Mushroom. Several players and devs are now wondering how these developers could easily change the publisher and developer names for their games and are questioning Valve’s moderation system.

While these fake listings have been taken down, it remains to be seen if this loophole will continue to be exploited and whether Valve will make any updates to correct it.