How to offer free money and still have nobody interested.
Here at MMO Fallout my first rule when it comes to any offer is; if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. You’re free to use that phrase at any point in your life, as I’m fairly certain it’s in the public domain.
Not too long ago I talked about CreaTeam and the latest swindle to hit Steam: 20,000 Miles Under The Sea. The folks at CreaTeam had been advertising their game alongside a $20,000 contest and quite frankly I don’t know anyone who can argue with the idea of a shady Russian indie dev clearly having $20K on hand for such a giveaway. Code Brown was a runaway success that sold thousands of cents worth of units.
CreaTeam’s page advertises the scam contest as follows:
Become a fearless underwater explorer and reach the bottom of The Mariana Trench to win 20,000* REAL DOLLARS!
Note that the contest doesn’t say “up to” before the 20,000 real dollars. Some of you have been distracted by the asterisk and bully to you if you were. That’s what we call an indicator that the person is lying, or at least telling a half truth. I’ll let the store page explain the details.
*not more than 20% of the total prize money from the sales of the GAME SOUNDTRACK. The advertisement offer is active only till the 31st of August 2020, 23:59 (GMT+3). The first account in the internal ratings table, till the 31st of August 2020, 23:59 (GMT+3) will be declared the winner of this tournament.
It’s fumbles a little with the wording, but the base answer is this; the reward is up to $20,000 with that prize pool made up of no more than 20% of the sales from the soundtrack. If you don’t believe me, here is the developer confirming it.
Yes, the prize money will be contain only 20% soundtrack sales. If no one buys – no prize money.
The soundtrack for 20,000 Miles Under the Sea costs $2.99, meaning up to sixty cents of each sale goes toward the prize. Meaning they would need to sell at minimum 33,334 copies in order to make that amount. At minimum. I’m willing to bet 33,000 more copies than any CreaTeam game has ever sold.
CreaTeam knows they aren’t selling anywhere in the fraction of a percent of 33,000 soundtracks. That’s why the $20 grand figure is a scam, it pitches an unrealistic benchmark that even the devs know they’ll never hit.
So what is the purpose of the scam when the title itself is free? The answer in my opinion is to artificially boost the game’s engagement and get it out of the low confidence metric, with the ultimate goal possibly being to turn it into a trading card farm. Thanks to Valve’s store changes it is downright impossible for shovelware devs like CreaTeam and Russian bot farms to make games that qualify for trading cards. CreaTeam’s other two titles have failed to breach Valve’s trust limits, meaning none of them are eligible even for simple things like contributing to a user’s game count.
There’s a reason this article is titled 20,000 Miles Under Nobody Cares. You’d think a game offering a potential for up to $20,000 in real money would spark some level of interest in the Steam community, but the ever increasing pile of shovelware and fraud on the Steam store has resulted in what I refer to as “Terminal Whatever,” where even the shady and likely fraudulent allure of big money doesn’t bring in people for a free game.
It’s pretty bad when you’re offering twenty grand in return for nothing other than some time and the overwhelming majority response is that it’s not even worth downloading and investing five minutes into.
20,000 Miles has 51 reviews as of this publishing with many noting how the game is as unstable and as prone to crashing as you would expect from a lazy shovelware asset flip meant to prop up a scam contest. The current user rating is 41% “mixed.” It gets even more pathetic when you consider that the game hasn’t peaked at more than five concurrent users since August 8 and the best day this game had was on launch day with 14 whole people. The trailer has 126 views total.
Back in the day you’d have thousands of people stanning for shovelware trash just because the developer put in a bunch of achievements or had memes or stolen hentai. These days you can’t even get people to boot up a client for the possibility of handing over five figures in real money. That’s the benchmark of “not even if you paid me.”
The contest ended yesterday and we haven’t gotten an answer on who won or how much the payout was. I was originally going to wait out until the “winner” revealed their prize, but I came to the conclusion that unless the payout isn’t enough to cover a $5 Whopper meal at Burger King (ask your favorite Twitch streamer for details) I probably won’t believe they’re telling the truth anyway. Maybe it’s because the developer’s past has given me no reason to trust them.
Maybe I’m overthinking this. I need to clear my mind up with some sustenance.
MMO Fallout 