If you woke up early this morning, you might have seen that Helldivers 2 is on a massive sale on Steam. In fact, this is an imposter. Another game in disguise, it was immediately pulled from storefronts after changing its name, main art, and developer information to mimic the popular sci-fi shooter.
According to SteamDB – a third-party website that provides access to a large amount of Steam game information – the events leading up to this conclusion can be clearly seen. At 9:55 pm ET, the indie game Figurality was renamed Helldivers 2. Just a few minutes ago, the listed publisher and developer changed to PlayStation PC LLC and Arrowhead Game Studios respectively.
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Around the same time, the game’s description was changed to mimic the official Helldivers 2 store page. Tags, screenshots, trailers, assets, and associations have all changed. There’s even an epilepsy disclaimer added – paired with Sony and Arrowhead legal information of course. It’s here that the game’s sales increased by 75%.
Four hours later, at 1:07 a.m. ET, the game was removed “at the request of the publisher,” according to the Steam DB page. That’s why right now, if you try to find this fake Hellraiser 2 on Steam, it won’t show up. The game has been removed from the Steam store.
This is an interesting story. One, it’s great that this issue was discovered and resolved in such a short period of time. It’s crazy that this kind of thing could happen in the first place, but for those of you who ended up mistakenly buying this fake Helldiver 2 on sale, Steam’s refund policy will almost certainly put you off the purchase Price constraints.
What’s really crazy is… this probably wasn’t the only game at the time to try this. According to a post on the official Helldivers 2 Discord server, community manager Twinbeard wrote: “Unfortunately, there are currently two (now three?!) fake games on Steam being marketed as Helldivers 2. These are They are all fake. They are not made by Arrow, but they claim to be. We don’t know what they contain, but they have nothing to do with us. Our legal department is working on the matter and we want Valve to remove these products as soon as possible.”
An update came quickly when Valve took action: “It now appears that all fake store pages have been taken down by Valve, who acted quickly after being contacted by Valve. We will evaluate everything in due course. Also, many thanks To everyone who has sent me/us a private message or contacted me/us about fake pages and games. We stand together.”
Disaster was averted. I think imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and these various groups all want a piece of the incredible success Helldiver 2 has had since launch. Although stupid, bad luck. Everyone knows that if you want its glory, you need to earn it by getting your hands dirty on Maleveon Creek.