Hotcakes: Becoming Part Of the Steam Scam


I want to talk about indie dev bundle scams.

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Outbreak New Dawn Alters Alpha Date At Last Minute


Sergey Titov’s new title is already not meeting deadlines.

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Early Access: Magnificent 5 Is A Magnificent Bomb


From the worst developer on the planet.

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Steam Scams: Night City Offers Cyberpunk 2077 Keys For Positive Reviews


This was a really stupid idea.

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Steam Scams: SRM Games Meltdown After Fraudulently Revoking Keys


Claims Indiegala sold them illegally.

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Early Access Fraudsters: Win That War Still On Sale, Abandoned In 2017


Developer no longer in business.

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Steam Cleaned: Unraveling Remaining Threads of Dagestan Tech


The Russian symbiote of gaming.

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Deorum Online Defrauds Steam Store, Wins Free Ban


Title accused of fraudulent activity and incompetence.

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Not Massive: Fullscreen Inc. (Rooster Teeth Owner) Goes Ham On False Copyright Claims


Fullscreen Inc. owns The Witcher 3 and nothing you say can convince me otherwise. What? You say CD Projekt Red owns The Witcher 3? That’s impossible!

Obviously I’m being facetious. Fullscreen Inc., no stranger to allegations of copyright abuse, is once again digging itself into a PR hole yet again this weekend after Youtubers began receiving copyright strikes over gameplay videos from titles that Fullscreen definitely does not own. Adding insult to injury, the copyright claims don’t so much list proof of ownership or violation as they do a number.

This story was covered by Reclaimthenet, and it looks like Fullscreen Inc.’s copyright bot is targeting videos of The Witcher 3 and Doki Doki Literature Club. A quick look through Twitter returns a fair number of accounts posting their grievances with the company. This isn’t the first time Fullscreen Inc. has gotten in hot water over illegal copyright claims, as last July users reported having their ad revenue claimed over Doom gameplay footage.

Will Youtube fix its broken copyright system? Probably not. MMO Fallout has reached out to Fullscreen Inc. for comment and will update if we receive a response.

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Team Salvato, developer of Doki Doki Literature Club, has requested via Twitter that anyone who receives a copyright strike reach out to them.

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Steam Cleaned: Cyber Watch Abuses Screenshot Flags, Valve Does Nothing


Update 1/21/20: Valve has finally intervened and prevented Kartikay from banning the screenshots associated with my account.

I’m going to flood this article with screenshots to emphasize how Cyber Watch is a pre-alpha product and also so they show up on Google image searches.

It’s time for another update to our Steam Cleaned piece about the underhanded shysters working on Cyber Watch. Cyber Watch for those not keeping score is a low quality piece of shovelware pushed onto Steam in a pre-alpha state by publisher Kartikay Rathi. I published my review of Cyber Watch due to the fact that this game that had clearly been cobbled together in a short time-frame had been pushed onto Steam in a non-Early Access state, and the developer has since retaliated in ways to remind us just how shady and unprofessional they are. And just like the game itself, the cover up was lazy and low quality.

Unfortunately for Cyber Watch I keep my receipts. The four reviews posted under fake developer accounts were quickly hidden from public view after I posted my expose and it got extra exposure, but the evidence is still freely viewable to anyone who wants to see it. Head honcho Kartikay Rathi even went so far as to DM me on Twitter offering a backhanded apology while simultaneously lying about the reviews being done by college friends (again, I have the receipts) and summarizing with how he apologized and it should be good enough for me.

Sorry, it isn’t. Especially since at this point Kartikay decided that he would issue community guideline violation strikes to the four screenshots I had posed to Cyber Watch’s community page, resulting in a four day ban from uploading content. I appealed the decision to Steam support and received a response from a Sarah-Lynn who was more than useless. When any dev removes uploaded screenshots for community violations, it puts a universal upload ban on that account for one day per screenshot. To top it off the screenshots have been unflagged and reflagged, renewing the community upload bans each time.

The dev team, a group of college students who act more like a gaggle of preteens, have taken to trolling from private accounts that still have their names in the URL. Take Keshav Bhadana here for example:

And of course it wouldn’t be an update without another fake review, this time from yet another account located in Uttar Pradesh, India with only one game reviewed, and it’s Cyber Watch and a whole .2 hours on the game. This one I presume is an actual college friend of the devs, and I hope for their sakes that they weren’t forced to pay money for this garbage just to do a friend a favor.

Since its launch, Cyber Watch has peaked at one concurrent player. Nobody is buying it outside of the accounts used to push fake reviews, and after this dismal show of lunacy, nobody is going to buy it. The developer is now in full meltdown mode. This is the last post I’m going to make about Cyber Watch as the game and its developer’s reputation are already a smoldering pile of ash.