After some Valve intervention.
Roughly two weeks ago we reported on a rarely talked about scam going around Steam’s Early Access program. Developer HFM Games had attempted to pull a swindle on their customers by replacing the game Aiball: Drunks (a physics based soccer game) with Penguins Cretins (a physics based obstacle course game with penguins). The swindle it seemed was successful, as over a year after the fact and despite people reporting the game to Valve the company seemed to generally not care.
The story got picked up by Sentinels of the Store as well as Richard Hoeg of Hoeg Law who surmised that the wholesale replacement of an already purchased game, one that worked on less systems than the prior, could violate the good faith of the Steam license agreement. On June 9, Mellow_Online1 of the Sentinels posted that Valve had agreed to give the situation another look.
Well Aiball is back in all of its…well glory might be overselling it. Developer Kolotilov hasn’t so much taken responsibility for attempting to swindle customers as much as they are acting as though the changeback was completely of their own volition.
“The change of name of the game was due to a change of character, which was also based on physics. This is an early version of the game that is changing during development. But, as we see, people who bought Aiball do not need any penguins, so we are returning the old name and version of the game.”
Changing the game back after over a year and only once outside eyes are paying attention? You’ll excuse my doubt.
There are no doubt other games like Aiball: Drunks that fly under the radar and never gain publicity. I stumbled upon this game completely by accident while covering a different story on Steam, so who knows how many other games just haven’t been noticed because Valve isn’t paying attention to store reports and the people aren’t reaching out.
Aiball will probably go back to being an abandoned Early Access game, but at least the people who bought it for what it is can play it again.
MMO Fallout 