Helldivers 2 is officially suffering from success. There had already been signs, namely the need for the developers to upgrade its servers to hold the sheer amount of people who wanted to play, but the latest development is likely the surest. Overnight, two new fraudulent listings, ostensibly for Helldivers 2 at some pretty steep discounts, popped up on Steam, convincing new adopters to purchase games that didn’t end up being the sci-fi co-op shooter currently setting the world on fire.
As first spotted by VG247, the indie game Figurality had its store page changed to match that of Helldivers 2 late last night, even going so far as to list Arrowhead Game Studio and Sony as its developer and publisher, respectively. At this point, the game was steeply discounted by 75% to incentivize unsuspecting players to buy in. Soon enough, players caught wind of the fact that they were buying a different game and notified Arrowhead, which took to the official Helldivers 2 Discord server and quickly warned others against buying into the scam. Valve was seemingly notified soon after, and the game was delisted within a few hours.
Coincidentally, Figurality wasn’t the only game to hop on the bandwagon last night, with at least one other fake Helldivers 2 posting going up before Valve swiftly handled the issue. Steam’s refund policy should be able to cover folks who booted up either of the falsely advertised games, but it’s still pretty concerning that anyone can just do this with few countermeasures in place.
Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt took to Twitter early this morning to decry the “dupes” and the fact that they could be created so easily:
A community manager on the similarly popular survival game Palworld responded saying that they’d had two similar scams pop up for their game today. They noted that, similar to the cases targeting Helldivers 2, the dupes were pre-existing games that just changed their names and assets. Though Valve deftly handled the problem for both Pocketpair and Arrowhead, all four reported instances expose a huge flaw in Steam’s back-end that clearly needs to be addressed.
Otherwise, things are going pretty well for Helldivers 2, which has capitalized on its newfound popularity pretty well. With most of its server issues out of the way, players have been able to throw themselves against the bugs and killer robots of the galaxy and continue living out their Starship Troopers fantasies. Meanwhile, Arrowhead is spinning up the narrative beats of its galactic war and potentially even introducing mechs and a returning enemy faction to the game. Suffice to say, it’s a pretty good time to get into the game. Just make sure you’re picking up the right copy when you do.
