Another migrant from Stupid Town.
Holmgard Games seems to be proof that you can take the developers out of Free Reign Entertainment but you can’t take the Free Reign Entertainment out of developers. If you don’t know what Project L33t is, you probably don’t follow BigFryTV on YouTube.
Project L33t is an upcoming extraction shooter, because extraction shooters are all the rage these days. Sergey Titov meanwhile is one of the most notoriously incompetent game developers of all time, and the head of a studio who for years peddled in scamming gamers by selling early access to reskins of the same game only to abandon them within a year or two of launching their alphas.
The big problem with Titov and crew is that they aren’t very intelligent, and tracking them down has become relatively easy for the internet as they aren’t good at covering their tracks. So when Project L33t showed up people immediately realized that the marketing and pre-order tactics for the game almost directly mirrored Free Reign Entertainment’s prior titles.
I talked about Free Reign’s confidence scam way back in 2017, and it goes like this; convince people to preorder the game under the promise that they can have a guaranteed refund with no strings attached up to a certain point (usually after the first alpha phase) and then bait people to keep their purchase after that point by promising features only to never release them once you have their money. Xsolla’s convenient incompetence in denying refunds and losing orders also played into the scam.
Project L33t is going by the exact same playbook as prior Free Reign Entertainment games, which is by no means a unique strategy but more than enough reason to become skeptical. We know that multiple members of the Holmgard Games team are prior employees who worked on War Z and Shattered Skies because they’ve confirmed such in the official Discord.
The studio has also denied involvement by Sergey Titov, which has happened in the past and also turned out to be not entirely honest. And the same is true here, as Titov is a partner in one of the firms funding Holmgard Games.
And as any completely trustworthy company does, Holmgard Games decided the best course of action when these criticisms were brought to light by YouTuber BigFryTV was to file a fraudulent DMCA takedown and have the video censored. I’ll remind our readers that a bad faith DMCA filing can constitute criminal perjury in the United States. The video has been reuploaded below.
BigFry followed up to explain that the developers offered to remove the strike if he agreed to sign an NDA until the game launched. Another tactic pulled from Sergey Titov’s playbook.
Sending a false DMCA claim to censor criticism in today’s world is just about the quickest avenue toward corporate suicide. It never accomplishes anything except ensuring that anytime the game and company are brought up in the future, people will talk about their shady and dishonest behavior. And rather than quell dissent, fraudulent takedowns only serve to confirm that your company is indeed run by people not worthy of trust or business.
Is Project L33t a scam? Probably not. Has Holmgard Games set itself up as its worst enemy in convincing the world that it’s not a scam? Without a doubt.
Dumber than a second coat of paint, as George Carlin would say.
MMO Fallout 