Phanom Games – MMO Fallout

I bought Operation Breakout because I’m willing to throw down nearly $10 on a hunch.

Operation Breakout is catching some attention over its sudden appearance on Steam’s trending games list and since this is Steam it’s probably for all the wrong reasons. If you look on the store page you’ll find 28 reviews, 8% of which are positive, and roughly one review being posted in 2019. The game itself has evidently been a massive failure in terms of users and sales.

So it came as a surprise that the game suddenly started showing over ten thousand concurrent players this week, yet nobody seems to be talking about the game. MMO Fallout Eyewitness News crew picked up a copy of the game to see what we would find within. The results were not so surprising.

As you can see in the screenshot above, there are no servers for this game. Seven thousand people logged in at the time of this writing, and yet literally not a single person is actually playing the game.

The answer? Operation Breakout has trading cards, and the most likely explanation is that a lot of game keys have been dumped on a grey market website for cheap and bought up by card farmers.

This isn’t the only suspicious title from publisher Phanom Games. Another title Fireflies has several periods in 2017-2018 where the game inexplicably spikes to over over a thousand concurrent users despite the fact that the game looks and plays terrible and a relatively small number of reviews.