A lot of stolen content.

If this week had a theme that theme would be copyright infringement. A whole lot of people trying to make money or gain attention from stuff they don’t legally own, and thanks to Valve’s questionable quality control these games almost made it onto Steam. At the very least they made it far enough to get store pages.

Let’s dive in to the retirements/rejections.

BlackSite

BlackSite Area 51 was a 2007 video game released by Midway Games on the PS3, 360, and PC. Midway Games has since gone out of business and the BlackSite property is owned by Warner Bros. You know who didn’t own it? The random Lithuanian Steam user who decided to post the $100 to run a scam and try to get away with as much money as possible before WB DMCA’d the game.

BlackSite was pulled by the scam artist who apparently did not like all of the negative attention he was getting. You know, negative attention for running a scam and trying to sell pirated software like some kind of garbage person.

Hikaru’s Imagination Rebellion

Hikaru’s Imagination Rebellion is published by CureLovelyWarrior, a hack fraud who compiles pre-built games using stolen assets and has probably never had an original creative thought when producing video games. And by producing I mean stealing. Their other titles include a pre-built snake clone and a pre-built bejeweled clone.

Hikaru’s Imagination Rebellion was rejected from Steam just as Lovely Warriors was last week because of blatant and unapologetic theft. The creator is in his thirties and has a pension for throwing major temper tantrums.

Ironsight

Ironsight went away on Steam this past week, except not really. What had happened was Aeria Games lost its licensing deal with Wiple Games and the publishing reverted back to the original developers. The good news is that Ironsight on Steam is now more globally accessible. The bad news is that progress will not carry over.

A reminder that when God shuts a door he also slams closed a window.

Dragon’s Prophet

Someone asked me if I felt guilty about what they called bullying the Dragon’s Prophet people not just out of Steam but into abandoning the project completely and my answer is no, not even 1%. Dragon’s Prophet was a fraudulent venture using stolen leaked code, being backed by con artists.

Those who read MMO Fallout know that I have no problem with private servers existing for dead games. What Bobygame did however was represent themselves as a legal, licensed partner with Runewaker which they were not. They supplied phony, stolen paperwork to validate their legitimacy. They stupidly banned me from their forums for trying to get a straight answer, which only served to turn people against them even more. Then when I provided conclusive evidence straight from Runewaker’s mouth that they were not a legitimate licensee, they doubled and tripled down on their lies. They banned dissent, and killed any trust or imaginary legitimacy they might have had.

This is the same Bobygame that has tried defacing Dragon’s Prophet’s wikipedia page to insert themselves as a publisher, that created fake wikipedia pages pretending their fake company is real, and never once had the integrity or sense to cop to the lie and be honest with their potential community. This isn’t the work of a budding private server operator, it’s a criminal scam operation.

And yes, I understand that they had to desperately keep the scam going because admitting they weren’t legitimate would mean having no chance at getting on Steam. Spoiler: It was never going to work in the long run. I’m sorry if my exposing your scam as a scam destroyed your enthusiasm for running that scam.

Mars 2030

2016 title Mars 2030 by Advent RPG was pulled from sale this week. The developer posted on Steam last month that the game would be ended due to decline of sales, however they hope to release a remastered version at some point in the future.

MyRPG Master

A WYSIWYG RPG making game, MyRPG Master has been in early access since 2015 and has been dead for a few months now according to the game’s forums. The folks at DragonHead Studio have apparently deemed it unnecessary to provide the most base communication to their customers as the game’s news page has not been updated since 2016.

Minimum

2014 title Minimum has been pulled off Steam this week by publisher Atari. There has been no communication with the developers in a few years and similarly no explanation or notice that the game was to be retired from sale.

Handball 16

Handball 16 was retired after five years on sale by developer Eko Software. There’s no comment on why the game was pulled but an annual sports game five years down the line? We can guess expiration of license or a lack of players. Or both.

Misbits

Misbits has been removed from sale after a stellar five months in early access. The full developer announcement can be read here.

The bottom line is game development and service is super challenging and costly – even without the added uncertainty of a pandemic. A free-to-play game of mostly quick play matches, needs to amass a sizable audience of returning players to maintain a fun multiplayer experience. Despite building a stellar core community, we have just not been able to turn that corner and reach a tipping point.

This might be more convincing in a month where Fall Guys doesn’t have millions of players.

Exowar

Top down shooter Exowar is off Steam this week after five years of sale and an 18% mostly negative rating. The developer posted:

As I am not able to work on the game anymore or provide any updates/fixes and it currently contains some major issues which make it unplayable, I have decided that it would be best to take it off the store.

STEAM BANS

Publisher: Figure Games

Fun story about Figure Games. Back in yonder olden years of two weeks ago when I wrote about the Run! Steam scam I received an angry email from Figure Studios accusing me of misinformation and blaming me for getting people banned who were taking part in the market manipulation scam. MMO Fallout had no involvement in anyone getting community banned for the Run! scam, you can bet that investigation was started and finished well before I published my piece, even if the bans came afterward. Figure Studios also called me racist because I noted that a lot of the scams we follow are from Russian devs.

Anyhow I decided to open an investigation of Figure Games because nothing says “I have something to hide also” like such an aggressive email. I found my answer, here’s the one I’ll give you. Figure Studios had a game out called Figure Quest. The game doesn’t exist for people to enjoy it, on account of it is baby’s first game tier quality. Figure Quest exists for a similar reason to the shovelware games that have five thousand self-unlocking achievements. It’s so people can inflate account figures and feel like they’re cooler for it.

Figure Quest has marketplace items, and one of those items is a 1,000 pack of green figures. They cost something like a buck when they were still for sale. Utterly useless in every sense of the word, except that pack can be opened to produce one thousand figures. Go figure. My theory is that the figures exist solely to artificially inflate people’s inventory numbers at the profit of the developer. Figure Studio wins, the manchild with low self esteem wins, really everyone wins.

I considered writing an article about Figure Studios and my conclusions but I didn’t because it was clear from my investigation that they were next up on the chopping block, that Greenfigure would be gone within the week, and that publishing a piece would be a big waste of time. Mostly I just didn’t want to hand ammunition for the guy to make the paranoid claim that I got him banned as some sort retaliation for sending me an angry email. It takes five seconds to delete an email and that’s five more seconds I could be spending eating a delicious Boston cream Klondike bar. What would you do for a Klondike bar?

I would not interact with Greenfigure for a Klondike bar. Not even a Neapolitan flavor. In addition to Figure Quest, Valve banned CuBB, Bomb Survival, and Figure World.