Beware Of Scam Palworld And Helldivers 2 Listings On Steam With Big Discounts

Both Helldivers 2 and Palworld have seen explosive growth and popularity since their respective releases, drawing in millions of gamers around the world. With this popularity, though, also comes opportunistic folks trying to make a quick buck by piggybacking off the hype. This is exactly what happened both titles, with fake copycat games appearing on Steam claiming to be 50% to 75% off the regular price.

On X, CEO of Arrowhead and Helldivers 2 Creative Director Pilestedt posted about “store dupes” of Helldivers 2 that were using stolen imagery and effectively mimicking the official game. In reply to this, the community manager for Pocketpair, who is behind Palworld, replied, explaining that two of these phony games also appeared for Palworld and were taken down when they emailed Steam. They further explained that “They aren't new apps, basically, they take an appid of their existing game and just swap the name and pictures to that of yours.”

We had 2 pop up for Palworld today, got them taken down almost immediately when we emailed Steam.

They aren't new apps, basically, they take an appid of their existing game and just swap the name and pictures to that of yours. In our case, both games were small Russian games.

— Bucky | Palworld & Craftopia (@Bucky_cm) March 1, 2024

Purportedly, this is not a new scam, but it is quite curious that it can happen in the first place, given Steam’s oversight of its platform. According to the Steamworks documentation, you can only change the name of the game via a support ticket or if you unlocked “Profile Features,” which come for games “that have achieved broad player engagement and some commercial success are eligible to create content that players can use in their Steam Community profile.” The scam games that appeared for Palworld and Helldivers 2 were likely in this latter category, so hopefully, Steam will look to address how this happened, perhaps through a limited amount of name changes that can happen in a certain period of time.

Regardless of the fixes, gamers should be a bit wary about anything they are buying and downloading anywhere on the Internet, Steam included. The best easy step that folks can take when it comes to Steam is to check reviews, which is a good thing to do anyway, to verify that what they are checking out is the real McCoy. Otherwise, you might find yourself playing a knock-off you didn’t mean to.