Strike Mole gets the banhammer.
Here at MMO Fallout we pride ourselves on unearthing and publicizing shady game developers and for a while now that coverage has expanded to include a certain subsector of suspicious games. Namely I am talking about the high priced asset flips that I suspect and am pretty confident in my suspicion are involved in money laundering.
It sounds simple; the price ensures normal customers won’t touch it, the cost of creation is low, and the relative anonymity of the Steam store and Valve’s lax standards pretty much guarantees that it will go unnoticed. Well except for those meddling kids at MMO Fallout. And even then with Valve’s general response time who can say they’ll do anything by the time Lize is done laundering its cash? Assuming that’s what they are doing. Allegedly.
Strike Mole is a game that we covered way back in December and I am shocked to say that Valve has finally had action taken against it. I noted in our original coverage that the full game can be bought on the Unity asset store and compiled at home for the much cheaper cost of $25, and for a while actually considered buying the game and putting it online myself for free.
But someone at Valve finally swung the banhammer down on Strike Mole and its fraudulent developer Lize this weekend. Outside of the eight months passing after public notice for action to be taken, I am equally disappointed that I did not notice the developer name in my original coverage. Lize? Sounds like lies. It couldn’t be any more on the nose unless they named the developer Sigmund Fraud. My spellcheck does not like that joke.
There are still a handful of suspicious probably-money-laundering games on Steam running $200 for an obvious asset flip. Will Valve take action against those? We can hope, personally I’m going to wait until I see it.
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