Not long ago, a fake game appeared on the Steam platform that used the name of “After the Cataclysm” in an attempt to confuse the public. Recently, the same phenomenon has appeared again, and this time the target of the fraudulent use is the recent The very popular multiplayer cooperative shooting games “Battlefield 2” and “Phantom Pallu” even have special promotions to trick players into making wrong purchases.
No, Helldivers 2 is not 75%/50% off on Steam. Someone else is using a different game and renaming it exactly like a Helldivers 2 listing as a scam pic.twitter.com/NLy1uUoxd6
— Wario64 (@Wario64) March 1, 2024
Twinbeard, the community manager for “Battlefield II”, warned players on the game’s Discord server to be aware of similar scams. According to him, unfortunately there have been two to three fake games on the Steam platform that use the name of “Battlefield 2”, emphasizing that those games are fake and have no connection with the original developer Arrowhead, even if they might claim so. As for the content of those fake games, they have no way of knowing. What is certain is that they have nothing to do with them.
In addition, they also confirmed that the Arrowhead team’s legal team has launched an investigation into this matter, and called on Valve officials to remove these misleading products from the Steam platform as soon as possible. According to Twinbeard, only “Battlefield 2” and “Battlefield 2: Super Citizen Edition” released by them on February 8 are correct versions, and other versions are counterfeit versions.
“It’s really sad and frustrating that someone with good intentions is pretending to be our name and trying to commit fraud. For this reason and the security concerns, we call on players to be cautious. Once again, “Battlefield 2″ is the only product released by us. There are only two versions that are labeled as Dead Rangers 2 and Dead Soldiers 2: Super Citizen Edition,” Twinbeard wrote.
But he also added that he has not yet carefully examined the fake “Battlefield 2” game page, and promised to provide more follow-up new information in the future.
Fortunately, according to Twinbeard’s subsequent public information, after they tried to report a similar phenomenon to Valve, they also responded quickly and have now officially removed all counterfeit products of “Battlefield 2” from the shelves. However, Arrowhead will continue to monitor subsequent developments and would like to thank all players who reported this matter to them.
While Valve reacted quickly when it became aware of the counterfeit version of Deadpool 2 appearing on Steam, the multiplayer shooter developed by Arrowhead isn’t the only recent victim. Bucky, the community leader of “Phantom Parlu”, which became popular at the beginning of the year, also said on Twitter that he had discovered a large number of fake games using the name of this game on Steam, which also made them very worried. According to him, Steam also removed these fake games after the Pockerpair team contacted them, and hopes that no players were deceived.
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
Many players are curious as to why Valve allowed these products that use popular game names in an attempt to confuse the public to be sold on the Steam platform in the first place. However, the reason why these misleading game products can successfully appear on the Steam platform seems to be that some intentional development teams have changed the names of their already released products, thereby replacing them with “Bad Soldiers 2”, For popular games such as “Phantom Parlu” and “After the Catastrophe”, even the pictures, introductions, developers, and publisher names on the product pages have all been replaced, almost to the extent that they can be mistaken for real ones. We just need Valve to take countermeasures as soon as possible to prevent players from being deceived by similar means.
