MMO Fallout

Today’s Steam Cleaned topic is One Wish, the latest game to be targeted by card farming bots because Steam allows this sort of thing.

One Wish is by all means a completely forgettable title owing to the simple fact that it came and went without a whole lot of fanfare. The game launched back in June 2018 and probably performed just fine for a low budget game. One Wish also has trading cards, and appears to have been the subject of a mass botting campaign that took place this week.

Despite the fact that One Wish has had two forum threads and less reviews than would fill up a Battlefield server, the game experienced a 24 hour peak of over eight thousand players. Keep in mind this is a game that previously had long periods where nobody was playing at all. Eight thousand concurrent players yet nobody is discussing it in the forums and nobody is leaving reviews. It’s almost as if those accounts don’t have a real person at the helm. Almost.

And 24 hours later, the swarm is gone. Like an antelope devoured by a swarm of piranha, One Wish is back to having 0 concurrent logins.

I wanted to see if One Wish was by its lonesome, so I did a quick look at the other titles listed by developer GD Nomad, and wouldn’t you know it? I found more. GD Nomad also developed My Bones which experienced a similar but nowhere near as large spike in users over the past couple of days. My Bones has a “mostly negative” 25% positive rating on Steam, not exactly the kind of game to jump up 2,500 players for no reason. It averages one or two reviews per month, if even that. It does have trading cards.

Wooden House has trading cards, and wouldn’t you know it. My Bones hasn’t had a single post on its forums in nearly two years and one review since October.

GD Nomad’s library is chock full of games that have sudden inexplicable leaps in popularity only for that popularity to immediately die the following day.

Now none of this is meant to imply misconduct on the developer/publisher’s part, nor is it conclusive evidence that the games are being farmed for cards (although it’s pretty clear). The games could have been swept up by bot farms given that they are 1.) cheap and 2.) have trading cards. That’s all you need. These games are literally a dime in some currencies, and it’s also possible that some keys got dumped off on one of those grey market Russian websites that like to buy these games in bulk from the dev to use in bot farms. Not a bad return for games that most people seemed to hate.

More Steam reports as they appear.