There’s malfeasance (allegedly) afoot in Steam early access. Today’s piece comes to us about the game Day of Dragons, currently in early access on Steam. Day of Dragons bills itself as “an online creature survival game set in a large, beautiful, sandbox open world with multiple biomes and distinct creatures. Rule the world as one of several dragon species, or play as an elemental.”
We here at MMO Fallout have dealt with plenty of dirty Steam devs, but the accusations being levied this week really take the cake. The developer of Day of Dragons, Jao, has been accused of hardcoding bans of two Youtuber critics into the game’s files that apparently cause the game to crash on startup if either try to play. The two Youtube creators are IGP_TV and IcyCaress, both of whom have been very vocal in criticizing Day of Dragons for being a cheaply made prototype using store bought assets. So another day in the indie neighborhood.
The video posted by IGP_TV creates a dump of the game’s memory and then checks the files in a hex editor. Among the code they find six Steam ID’s that have been hardcoded to prevent the game from running.
Hey again. People have uncovered some hard-hitting evidence to prove our ban is real in DoD. Fun. pic.twitter.com/w2mpfoaaGL
— IGP (@IGP_TV) December 15, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Youtuber SidAlpha confirmed through his own investigation that the dump contains the six hard coded Steam ID’s.
I have installed the game and created my own dump file for verification. I can confirm 100% that there are 6 Steam ID’s hard coded within the executable to prevent accessing the game. https://t.co/aNFDpp2dbo
— SidAlpha (@SidAlpha) December 16, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Several parties including MMO Fallout have reached out to Valve for comment. Current Steam Terms of Service for developers state that game bans cannot prevent a user from launching the game. It will have to be seen how Valve respond to these allegations, if they do.
MMO Fallout 