Steam Cleaned: Game Swapping Is Still Happening

And this one isn’t even in early access.

Those of you who read MMO Fallout are probably aware that I have been on a bit of a crusade against Steam-related scams as well as Valve’s general unwillingness to do anything about it until they are literally shouted into the fetal position by a combination of publicity, public shaming, and the possibility that they too might be held liable should any legal action be incurred from the developers they afford leniency toward.

If you want more proof of that look no further than the game Depth Stranding which outside of its questionable title is still marketing itself on the shady promise of $20,000 in prize money to the first person who completes it. Valve has so far said nothing.

But last month we discussed an underground trend on Steam where developers are wholesale replacing their games with other games, often times in early access. I say underground because this tends to happen with games that seemingly have few to no sales, so generally there’s nobody around to complain about. Until there was, which is how it got to my desk.

Now you’ll notice that the games involved with this move are overwhelmingly hack fraud developers peddling asset flips and pre-built games that launch on Steam only to fail miserably because they are hack fraud developers peddling asset flips, so the developer decides that instead of paying the $100 for a new listing that they will just replace their old failed asset flip with a new failed asset flip.

While writing up the script for the Week in Review I came across this title Questery. Questery is a rather mediocre looking third person fantasy dungeon crawler that looks absolutely nothing like the screenshot below.

That’s because this game is Complete Shooter. You see Questery launched in April 2018 and for two years it was known as Questery, a medieval game where you did medieval things in a medieval world. This is what it looked like.

Then on June 23, 2020, developer Stequer did a 180 and replaced Questery with Complete Shooter, a crappy looking shooter that you might recognize its pre-made asset map.

The same one used by mediocre shovelware Cyber Watch.

I have to assume that after the waterfall of coverage that someone at Valve took notice because on July 17 Complete Shooter reverted back to Questery. Either that or the developer had a change of heart, or they noticed the attention other games were getting for this behavior and decided to reverse course.

But the changeover is proof that developers are still going to act shady and that flipping games is still an issue on Steam. One that is getting harder to hide because more eyes are on the lookout, but one that exists nonetheless.

And this game didn’t even have the thin protection of claiming it was in early access.