The Cellar possibly the same people.
Night City is a shady game by questionable people, and thanks to the diligent work of the Steam community reporting this product and the folks at Valve actually paying attention to those reports, the game has been pulled from sale and banned from the Steam storefront.
Three games got swept up in today’s ban and I’ll be honest I probably should have reported on one of the two of them when making my commentary yesterday. When doing my research for the Night City article I came across a possible connection to another Steam developer/game. Night City is developed by Valentine Studios who have also taken the role of publisher.
The Cellar is the second game caught up in the ban, and one that came to my attention when I was looking up Night City. According to Madjoki’s database, both The Cellar and Night City share the same customer support email contact: thecellargame@gmail.com. The Cellar lists its developer/publisher as Psycho Boy Jack. It released last year and got virtually no attention outside of one or two reviews.
Naturally neither “company” has a web presence outside of the Steam page. It’s something that I stuck in my back pocket due to a lack of corroborating evidence. While we can’t say for sure that the two developers are the same people, the email and the fact that Valve swooped in and banned it alongside Night City does make a compelling argument.
And finally we have Cyberprank 2069 on the banlist which is fitting yet odd. You see Night City wasn’t the first developer to think of raffling Cyberpunk 2077 keys in exchange for purchases and reviews. Cyberprank 2069 did it in July of 2019 and they got pulled from the Steam store for it. It seems odd that Valve is applying the ban yet again now. Fun fact: Cyberprank 2069 was previously called Cyberpunk 2069.
Some final thoughts on Night City: I did some checking and it really seems like Valentine Studios were trying to cause confusion for customers with regard to the Cyberpunk brand. First of all the announcements definitely copy the aesthetic from Cyberpunk 2077.
Second Night City is the name of the main location that Cyberpunk 2077 takes place in. Night City had been calling itself “Cyberpunk Game: Night City” up until April 17. It also launched on April 16 which is the day that Cyberpunk 2077 was supposed to release prior to its delay.
As usual, credit goes to SirViolentDeath for finding this as swiftly as he did.
MMO Fallout 