Hi, folks, it's Zaid Ikram. And today on Gamix, 5 games that turned out to be scams. So first, before we get into anything, I do wanna make it clear that this is opinion. We're having fun here. This is for entertainment purposes only. These are not formal complaints. I am not filing a suit of any kind. This is just calling it like I see it, what I know, what I feel. Also, anything said here, it's alleged. Unless otherwise noted, I can't prove anything. So with all that said, let's get started.
Number 5: The Day Before
Yeah, this is all opinion, but I think a lot of people can agree with this opinion. The Day Before, one of the most hyped games of all time and the number one most wish listed game in 2023. There were a lot of expectations going into The Day Before when it came out into early access on the 7th of December last year. Just four days later, developer Fantastic announced they were closing. So what happened? Well, to make a long story short, the game was beyond terrible. It was an unfinished mess that was nothing like the game they were advertising. It was supposed to be an open world survival MMO, but what came out was an extremely bare bones extraction shooter that was horribly buggy, unbalanced, and just all around terrible.
Now, this isn't to say people were not skeptical about the game going in. I mean, the game they were promising was gonna be The Last of Us, Mud Runner, Escape from Tarkov, and an MMO all combined into one, which is insanely ambitious right from the get-go. And this was coming from a developer nobody had ever heard of and was apparently mostly run by just two guys that were having a good time. Having a good time, yeah, that's the team that was gonna make this AAA online extravaganza, the kind of thing that even the biggest developers and publishers with hundreds of guys having a good time struggle with. I mean, yeah, sure, man, I'll bet.
There were plenty of red flags, but even if the game failed to live up to the hype, it still could have been a good game, something that's fun and interesting to play, but it wasn't. That was absolutely not the case. The Day Before was just an awful, unfun, torturous thing to play. There were already accusations about the entire thing being a scam before The Day Before came out. But those whispers turned into a roar when the people actually got their hands on this mess. There were accusations that devs exploited unpaid labor and used stolen assets, and that they lied about what the game was going to be. Former employees alleged the game was never even intended to be an MMO, even though that was all over the marketing.
The thing about the game is that it didn't have the hallmarks of a scam game. There wasn't anything you could buy beforehand. There was no Kickstarter or microtransactions or NFTs or anything that could pull in some cash upfront. So if there was some kind of fraud going on here, it could have been on a publisher level, like maybe the developers took the publisher for a ride. That's a distinct possibility. And it also makes sense when you start thinking about how making a video game, even a lousy one, is really hard. And the point of a scam is to avoid having to do real work for money. Like maybe some game dev people were like, "You know what we could do, we could just pitch like the greatest game of all time and, you know, not do it." Or maybe they just thought that they could do way more than they could. I don't know. But the final project was shockingly terrible.
Number 4: Abandoned
Even though it was just a basic demo, the influence of PT, the playable teaser for Silent Hills was huge. The game it was meant to advertise never came out, but the internet was voracious for some kind of follow-up or spiritual successor, enter Abandoned. These sort of PT likes are a dime a dozen, but Abandoned had one thing these games didn't. It got featured on the PlayStation blog back in 2021. That immediately gave the project an unearned credibility that a lot of folks got invested in, maybe too invested, in fact. They started coming with all these elaborate conspiracy theories about how Hideo Kojima was actually involved, how it was secretly some kind of teaser for a new Kojima project.
There was even an entire Reddit community built around looking for Easter eggs and talking about rumors. In hindsight, a lot of the stuff posted there was facetious, but there were definitely people who bought into the whole thing. The developers, for their part, seemed to encourage these rumors, although they really didn't have anything to do with Kojima Productions, and certainly didn't have access to the Silent Hill license. It was just a regular old PT ripoff with an ambitious trailer that probably wasn't representative of the final game. I say probably because Abandoned was, well, Abandoned on March 31st, 2022. The developers, Blue Box, said the game was delayed indefinitely, even though they previously were teasing a release of the prologue. Nothing ever came out. The devs disappeared in the night. The whole thing ended up being a waste of time. So what was the point? Maybe it was just for the clout. There were a lot of reports of the main dev's toxic behavior on Discord. We'll never really know what the end goal here was. Maybe there never was one. But looking back, it is a game with all the classic hallmarks of a scam. It's just that the rug pull never materialized. Instead, they just kind of lied by implication a lot about being associated with Konami or Kojima, and also straight-up normal lied also. Thankfully, they didn't get anybody's money, though.
Number 3: Helldivers 2 (or Figurality)
Yes, the popular online multiplayer shooter, Helldivers 2, is actually a scam. You heard it here first, folks. We're coming for you, Arrowhead Game Studios. No, we're not talking about Helldivers 2, the real Helldivers 2. We're talking about Figurality. Yes, the Steam page looks identical to Helldivers 2, with the same art, same developer, and even lists Sony as the publisher. The price seems a little off though. 75% discount on launch day seems pretty sketchy, but whatever. Then you actually launch the game to find out its shovelware disguised as Helldivers 2.
This is one of the many, many so-called fake game scams that have been popping up on Steam. The trick here is that shovelware devs disguise their crappy games as an actual popular game and try to make the store page look as close as possible to the real game in hopes of duping people into buying the wrong game. It's an absurd strategy, given Steam offers refunds, but I guess they're hoping to catch people who are really clueless about anything computer-related because otherwise you'd press the refund button. I mean, I know it's more than just a button, but it's not a lot more. Like nobody's gonna turn on this piece of crap and think it's Helldivers 2 for real.
You're not gonna play this game for two hours and be like, well, maybe, maybe in the third hour, it'll be like the game everybody is talking about. No, I think if somehow this dupes you on the store page, you're not gonna be duped in that way, I hope. Like maybe they were hoping nobody would turn on Helldivers 2 for two weeks, you know, the game that got an immense amount of hype that everybody was talking about. I don't know. Either way, anybody who was duped did quickly report the fraud, and Steam refunded everyone and removed the scam game from sale. And it's hardly the only game like this. It wasn't even the only Helldivers 2 copy game. But it's a good example of how shameless these scam games can be.
Number 2: Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube?
Oh, Peter Molyneux. It almost feels cliche to call one of his games a scam. Now, the thing is, most of the time, even if you don't like the game, no matter how much he may have over-promised before the game came out, the final product is still usually a complete game. It can be played and even enjoyed if you ignore all the over-the-top pie in the sky promises. Like Fable is by no means a bad game. Actually, there are people absolutely love all three Fable games. Also, birds of prey who talk over YouTube videos, Fable, they're great games. They're just definitely not what he promised.
You can't plant trees, you can't watch them grow in real-time. There's no competition between adventurers to complete quests. None of that's there, but it's still a good game. Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube? is bad. It's not even really a game. It's an app where you click on cubes, that's all you do. Or if you want, you can buy micro-transactions so you can click on a whole bunch of cubes at once. That's the whole game. The selling point here is not the gameplay, though. It is the potential reward that one lucky player would get for being the one to reach the center of the cube. So the whole game was a collaborative effort as everyone peeled away the layers of these cubes by clicking. So eventually, there would be one person who'd hit the center. And according to Peter, the reward would be life changing. So what was the reward? It was to make the winner the God of Gods in Peter's other terrible unfinished game, Godus. And they would get 1% of the revenue earned by Godus, which sounds like a pretty sweet deal, but the actual winner of Curiosity never did see a cent.
And the whole God of Gods thing was utterly pointless. Apparently, the person who was meant to keep in contact with the winner was let go, and nobody filled in for them. So they just stopped contacting the winner, even though that was the whole point, which, I mean, that sucks. That's really scummy. The 1% of the revenue of the game they were supposed to get, they did not get. Also, they closed down Godus, and it wasn't profitable anyway, so no money for you. So this life changing prize ended up not being so life changing after all. In fact, seemed like a whole lot of nothing.
Number 1: Vage Strike
Most scam games are just forgettable shovelware garbage that most rational people would look at for two seconds, immediately identify the game as trash, and then move on. One of the most common scam games is the crypto game, where you're not just having fun, you're also investing and possibly earning through playing or something like that. Listen, the end game here is vague. It's mostly a lot of NFT and cryptocurrency gobbledygook. But the actual games are just slapped together asset flips using a generic third-person shooter unreal template, and a few random things to push it up the AssetStore to make potential investors think it's a real game.
That's how most of these things go. But Vage Strike stands out a little more. The gameplay's actually decent. It seems to have had actual artists work on it. So what gives? Credit to this story goes to fellow YouTuber, Jauwn, who's doing God's work playing through all these awful crypto games so nobody else has to. They've been doing this for a while now, but recently found Vage Strike. And the relative quality of the game has them curious. So they dug through the game files and found a file with a Steam app ID, even though Vage Strike is an Epic Store exclusive, and discovered through looking through the ID number that all the games actually came from a game called Red Eclipse.
As it turns out, the makers of Vage Strike just stole the game wholesale and slapped a few new logos on it. I guess they hoped no one would notice. The thing is Red Eclipse was an open source game. They allowed for people to use their assets, people can even sell them. Literally, all the Vage Strike devs had to do was attribute the original developers, but they couldn't even bother doing that, probably because they were trying to scam investors into thinking that they made this game, not somebody else. But that's just speculation. What makes this whole thing extra ridiculous is that the stolen game was still using the Red Eclipse servers to host multiplayer. So the original devs were able to update Vage Strike to include a scam warning whenever anyone tries to start the game, which is incredible. Again, credit for this story goes to Jauwn for figuring this all out, and for pranking a scam game maker in their own game.
Conclusion
And that's all for today. We hope you found this video insightful and thought-provoking. Leave us a comment and let us know what you think about these gaming projects. Were you surprised by any of the stories? Have you ever backed a project that didn't live up to your expectations? We want to hear your thoughts and experiences.
As always, we greatly appreciate your support and thank you very much for reading. I'm Zaid Ikram. We'll see you next time right here on Gamix.
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