These Games Cost Over $2,000... and they're all shovelware. 

I'd just like to clarify my comments about "theft" and "stealing." In the process of making this video, I found that many of these games were "copied" by the developer rather than "stolen", as they are purchasable templates for games which seem to permit commercial use. However, games such as Royal Booty Quest definitely appear to be plagiarized, as the cards shown on their Steam store page are identical copies of Slay the Spire cards. It's not clear how much of Atomic Fabrik's catalogue of games are copied, how much are plagiarized, and how much are original. But it is clear that they're all garbage. G2A's product page says random Steam key packs are "for you... if you love good and high-quality games." But at least some of their vendors are knowingly distributing shovelware, which only meet the criteria of the bundles through review and price manipulation. Maybe I just had one in seven trillion bad luck, and maybe other vendors are more legitimate, but what I experienced was undeniably a scam.

This video is proof enough that hollow knight youtubers are so masochistic that they will go out of their way to experience pain.

For those who were curious about why the sound was going crazy in that last game. Unity (which most or all of these games were built in) has something called a 3d Audio Source that allows for audio to fade and swell depending on distance. The problem these dumb devs ran into was that they put the audio listener that receives the sound on the camera instead of the player character. Just another product of them not giving a shit.

these recent steam dumpster diving detective work videos are fantastic fire keep it up lmao

"they raise the price to $250 to prevent more people to buy and leave more negative review" I also saw in another channel that if you drop in 1 more negative review, they will get 10 bots to make positive review to counter. They are working wonders, so unless Valve do something about it, looks like nothing you can do here as Steam citizen.

I used to not care about garbage shovelware and unmodified asset store game templates, however about a year ago I began working on an open source project on github. I submitted so many improvements that the owner invited me to be an authorized collaborator on the project, and I was so excited I got to be a core part of such an amazing project. The bad part is when I was reviewing the traffic statistics several months ago and ran into a reddit thread where another user had mentioned a competitor to our project. Lo and behold, this "competitor" was a fork of our source code, but with absolutely no credit to original authors (illegal under the code license) and the scum was charging $15 (now charging $35, and also illegal under the code license). The user promoting it was also a bot account mindlessly replying to keywords in a handful of subreddits. These template ripoff games may seem harmless (ignoring the g2a scam portion) but they really do hurt actual developers, especially if the templates were open source rather than on the unity asset store. Please always report these scams with evidence to the proper authorities if they are breaking any laws/asset licenses.

I love that Steam is a place where even the most inexperienced solo indie dev can easily publish a game, but all this shovelware is really starting to get in the way of our ability to find a potential hidden gem. I often find myself clicking the store away because I get demotivated by the sea of obvious crap clogging my screen. I'm not sure there's an easy solution. From what I hear, the Epic storefront is even worse. Anyway, at least they make for the occasional entertaining video like this one. Liked and subscribed.

I thought these kind of "companies" died like 15-20 years ago. Apparently not and it's sad. Keep up the great work tho, people need to know about this shit

I would not be surprised if the selection of keys was indeed random... Atomik Fabrik produces enough crap that you'd still have a pretty good chance to mostly end up with their games simply because of sheer volume. If you randomly select from a population that is 80% crap, you're going to get, on average, 80% crap.

Protip if you demand a refund from a key distributor they will refund you zero questions asked because they know they are using g2a loopholes to sell shit

The first one is actually a Sonic fangame. You get the Sonic ring collection sound when going through the rings, and can even spindash, as demonstrated at 9:05.

Those keyesellers really missed a trick by not advetising a several hundred dollar value with their 12 dollar package.

"I miss Fly Fly Tuck Tuck 🥺 " words no one has ever spoken before this video

Shady practices like these are very common in my country. I remember applying for a game dev position 4 years ago and these people then explained that they made a new, small mobile game every week so I must be willing to work my ass off, and it just seemed like a terrible work environment. Tapped out quickly.

So the 'release one game a week' tipped me off, but the infinite runner showing the 'crashy racing' game title absolutely cemented my opinion of it. As a software engineer, that tells me they didn't write code. The copied line for line the code of whatever game they copied, and then just failed to find where to change the title text (if they even cared enough to try). Though giving it a moments more of thought, they somehow managed to introduce bugs into the code, or the original games were just bad to begin with. Maybe porting it over from IOS to be compatible with a computer messed some stuff up. I'm not sure on that front.

These remind me of the '2000 GAMES!' CD / DVD's you'd buy once for curiosity's sake for like $20 at the computer store back in the day and then realize you just lit that money on fire. Really hope Valve wakes up to crack down on this and similar scam companies.

My team is releasing a game in febuari, and this kind of shovelware really scares me. How are people supposed to find new indie crews when any game they find could be like this?

cowboy girl is the kind of game that feels like it should be like. just the intro to a slightly-saucy psychological horror game. Like doki doki but more saucyness.

Fire just solved his Silksong-Hollow Knight no content catastrophe. If he continued on the old route he would have gone mad. It wouldn't have taken long for him to do P5 all bindings, hitless, blindfolded, while the controls change from controller to keyboard every 5 seconds, solving an engenieering phisycs exam every boss. Glad you made it out sane

I’m sure there is some clever “dumpster Fire” joke that could be made… but I lost too many brain cells during the stream.

Curious how much the 1:1 copies of existing games steal. Like, obviously they're taking art assets. But given the "quality" of their other projects I wouldn't be surprised if they also were "borrowing" code. Grab some Unity game, decompile it, maybe tweak a few things, and boom suddenly a new game to put on the market. Sure, it probably doesn't exactly "work" but I don't think that's a high priority here...

rip those people who wasted money on steam keys just to get like one game out of 5 that's good

Now obviously key resellers are a place you use at your own risk, especially so when you're buying a 'mystery' bundle and you don't know what exactly is in that bundle, but I think places like G2A should really be verifying the overall quality of the games they add to these "Over X price and positively reviewed" bundles. That and Valve should really be trying to crack down on this kinda stuff.

The scam also lets them get around the steam guaranteed refund for a game you've played less than 2 hours in.

I thought Steam figured out asset flips. I'm so angry at those, they not only rob gamers of their money and time, they also hurt small devs that want to make small game and have profit from it, but they need to fight with asset flip accusations. Even if they don't use assets, they are sometimes accused of being asset flips, just because they are cheap and low quality (but not low effort) compared to bigger devs.

I always wondered what you would get when purchasing those random steam keys on g2a idk why I expected anything different you should make a video about the steam accounts people sold on there and how people are being tricked into buying accounts thinking it’s games

Yikes... hope someone is able to shut down these scams. Not really sure how anyone would go about that, but thanks for bringing attention to it nonetheless, it helps.

The screen does that in Cowboy Girl because it’s an Everhood ripoff and Everhood has weird visual effects during its battles I was so shook when i realized what it was copying ngl

From my experience these companies make these overtly expensive games, get a compromised credit card and buy a shit ton of keys from the game and then resell the keys on websites like G2A or Kinguin in key bundles

I actually didn't know that the random key things are like that, good lesson. I remember buying some as a kid. They always had a list of possible games though. But I bought maybe 3 and never got anything good.

Its just telling of the amount of work that went into these games that putting your PC screen into portrait mode would fix the overlapping issues.

Wait so just to make sure I understand....Your theory is that these people make these garbage games in an afternoon, sell tons of keys for dirt cheap to these scummy sellers for dirt cheap, who package them in bundles and make a profit off of deceiving people into thinking they're getting random good games...jeez...What was that you mentioned about money laundering though? Was your original hypothesis that people would just buy their own game essentially as fake customers, with individual "small" purchases of entertainment products not looking sus to the government?

11:05 THEY RIPPED OFF EVERHOOD??? OUT OF ALL THE GAMES???? But seriously: if they ripped off Everhood they have either 1 ran out of ideas or 2 are going after games that are well reviewed, as while it isn’t very popular, it’s rating is overwhelming positive

CA$260 is £156. Why would someone buy a game that’s nearly thrice the price of a AAA title game..?

It's really sad to see that there are developers like that too. I wonder if Valve will ever manage to get a grip on the situation.

I use to have a ex that was really into these keys I want to say it was a gambling thing but I don't know but now I have a bunch of this trash in my steam library💀

I'm pretty sure the font in Cowboy Girl is from The Binding Of Isaac.

I think "button" isy default text for button objects in most code compilers.

This is a huge scandal and needs to be publicized. And Steam needs to be informed.

#9 (Cowboy Girl) uses assets from a creator called "Ækashics," which are most often used for RPG Maker battlers (Tho not limited to that). I can recognize those assets anywhere cause I've used them myself before. Lol.

Honestly Steam Greenlight should have never been shut down man :(, it was super cool going on there to try out different games on there but it's gone :/

you forgot the most expensive one, "train simulator". this game has 720+ DLC's ranging from 5.99€ to 49.00€, back in the days i made a calculation and came up with a sum of more than 8.000€. wondering how much it is now because they released many more DLC's for this game since my calculation.

steam really needs to do better on how they let things be reviewed or even placed on their store

Thanks for bringing attention to scams like these

Ahhhh that entire review scam system makes so much more sense now! I was trying to figure this out for the longest time wow

Don't these key resellers hurt themselves by making the bundles 1 good game and the rest actual garbage? Are these refundable?

Really unfortunate to see that none of these legendary 'games' ever received nominations for GoTY.

Just a little thing you may have missed. These games are all crypto miners. That's why they're so low-res asset flips that cost so much. And why that one was called a virus. You mined crypto for them.

Now honestly. This sounds like a rather lucrative venture. They have a ton of games, Asset Store prices for each Game, and, most importantly, Steam Shop Price (100 bucks) and still seem to make a profit somehow.

There should be something done with this kind of scams. For example. 1. If the dev raises the price of the game to more than 10% of the previous value, it will be automatically suspended, until a Steam mod would check it. It could be raised to more than 10% if the game is Early Access and becomes released, but other than that, every game should be manually checked. 2. New devs and new games added, should be manually checked anyway. So if the mod sees, the game is blatant rip-off, they would ban the dev. 3. This dev exist for quite some time. They should literally be removed from Steam and Steam should post a big announcement, so the devs of the original games could easily read the announcement and sue the dev for stealing their games. That would quickly cost the thief a big sum of money. Steam could also maybe sue them in some way, that they use unethical way of using Steam. They can just make a rule in the ToS, that the game must be fully Yours and if not, Steam expect You to pay for that. That simple rule would prevent them from doing something like that. And there is literally tons of other possible countermeasures. But if we won't do anything, thieves would only steal more. This is not anti-beneficial to Steam as well, because they will have reputation ruined. Maybe not super much, but selling spam, stolen games would definitely affect their reputation. And we also should be able to sue G2A as well for making such deception. It's easy to do that. Just make a proof that these games costed less and then they raised the prices to deliberately sell bad games as they were better. You made the evidence already. These games costed few, people bought them, they raised price, sold it to G2A and possibly even work together to sell scam games and both G2A and the dev would have to pay large fines. But if we don't do anything, it will only get worse.

We can sell as many keys as we want on other stores. Steam limits the amount given out at once however. They used to let us give out as many as we wanted as well, but they have since cut down on the free key give aways. The problem is stores that obtain these keys and sell them without the developers consent. Also that verifies your hunch, but the limit isn't 5000. Its infinity. As long as a portion of the keys that they request are actually being used, they can keep requesting more.

They started switching companies around now ou find at most 2 games with this scheme per company, making it harder to report all of them.

seeing FUNKO JohnWick/Keanu Reeves in a game is probably the funniest thing I've ever seen.

oh! school bus simulator is like an amazon app store game. I have an old kindle running a real old version of android and the amazon app store, since it doesn't show you anything your device is too old to run, is just filled with school bus simulators and such. Wouldn't be surprised if they're all using the same assets.

As someone who is making weird games for myself, I can confidently say that most of the ones I make are far better, and I can confirm that most of them are terrible.

for that monster truck game that moved randomly i bet how they made it was when your holding down the mouse button your vehicle moves to a certain point on the track problem is those points are at fixed spots so you move to the next one each click and they are supposed to be evenly spaced but they messed up some at random so when you moved further it was because it was moving to the next valid point! think of it like gps you tell it the destination and it shows the path to take

Damn, these new "I played X games related to Y topic" series are amazing! Please keep them coming. :)

This is why the Steam Store needs more curators

i kinda think they should ban steam devs from releasing more then like 5 games a year, and they should have to apply to get steam keys for their games, and then steam can see the "quality" to give them the keys

Even bigger developers review their own games. When I worked at one every not official steam account we had (for game testing) had positive reviews of our games published and they weren't 1h game time reviews ;)

i LOVE how ai generated scammers first and foremost target and destroy automated gambling fraud.

You have game devs saying they prefer that you flat out pirate their games instead of buying them off G2A and other grey market websites. And I agree with them.

Have you tried to report them to Valve? If they seriously only sell those games through generated keys and they set the price absurdly high so that no body will buy them to keep their fake reviews "Mostly Positive" then Valve would like to know it, because they not only abuse their systems, but also and most importantly for them, they avoid paying Valve what they should.

Thank you for crediting the music and sources used in the video ❤️

Stuff like this is why i support the class action against them for unfair competitive pricing. Edit: appreciate your soundtrack

shiț, man, as a moldovan game designer myself, i never expected to open a random video in my yt feed and see a review of a moldovan "game" company lol:D no surprise, we are pretty poor (in terms of money as well as solid qualified workforce) and the IT/game guys are one of the most "rich" here (rich just being not completely broke), i mean, to have a salary like mine (500$, not a local company) is considered pretty decent even though i can be hard to live even alone for this money, but it's pretty common to live at 200-300$ and have food prices somewhat close to european ones plussss a certain game company (not this one) tends to eat every other ones, and this one is not a great place to work, sooo it's really hard to be a game designer / dev when you have, like, about 5-10 companies for the whole country and if you wanna open your own, well, you gotta face post-soviet biz / taxation rules of play, which are pretty meh not gonna defend these guys, but, well, we try our best here, sorry for all the BS:)

with the smash cars game, the reason why your car was random is because its a mobile game, your mouse is simulating the touch controls. it seems like the distance from the truck was what controlled it, not the length of ur click.

27:58 I swear two of the kids on that bus are just clones of that kid from Resident Evil XD

funko pop keanu reeves killed me

I knew these felt familiar, atomic fabric also made tuk tuk extreme sim, just that's actually cheap

I had to do a fucking double take when you started playing cowboy girl, that is just straight up Everhood's battle system but absolutely butchered and ruined. Holy shit. Of ALL THINGS to force Everhood's gameplay into, they went with whatever the fuck that was.

it's sad that the best game of that bunch was fly fly tuk tuk the very first game, it just went downhill from there.

when silksong takes so long to release that the youtubers give up on HK content entirely

Its very clear money laundering

I also did buy a pack 3 months ago, it was a "Premium pack" and yeah 3 out the 5 games were trash, the other 2 games were actually Lego Batman for some reason 2 of the same copies lmao but one was the deluxe pack so I just gave the sec copy to my friend :D

I'm not gonna lie, I think I'm in love with Cowboy Girl.

11:05 definitely wasn't expecting an everhood ripoff lmao

This has to be illegal at some point. Genuinely

King's Castle ripping off Kingdom Rush assets is so unapologetic. The start button, the cropped menu background, the map, the castles on level icons.

12:23 Sound effect is the Start Race sound effect from Gran Turismo 3 and other titles in the Gran Turismo Franchise

27:58 Is that sherrie birkin on that bus lol

The funny part for me is some of these actually look like they could be decent if more time and effort was put into them. But naaah, why do that when you can keep shoveling out?

“It keeps going?” No they just forgot to program an ending sequence, they didn’t expect anyone to get that far.

If you want cheap games, buy the Humble Bundle and support charity!

Tbh, this type of abuse should be noticed and punished by the officer of steam..

@27:12 I love that the school bus, famously yellow, is blue

The real heroes are the people tracking down all these "games" to give accurate reviews

Amazing video !!! Thanks for your work

12:50 If the distance per click is random, isn't this basically car-based Blackjack?

great video! also holy crap dude you look SOO MUCH like this guy I know Ian, freakin crazy

Sounds like we need some dark, edgy anti-piracy ads with a unsaturated filter and slightly unsettling distorted metal music to play at the beginning of every video game saying something like "Copying Someone Else's Video Game... is a CRIME!" That way, they'll know ;)

High key vibing with you using Core Keeper's OST in your vid. Such an underrated soundtrack.

We call some of those games "Tutorial flips" basically someone followed a "Lets make a game in X engine" and changed a few details or textures (or none at all in some cases) and posted the games on steam and other sites for pay.

I clicked on this worried that it was about Shovelware Studios. Today I learned that “shovelware” is an actual word

Why does stream allow this? Have they ever addressed? One new games a week seems like a very obvious red flag they could easily look into. Thanks for great video.

Someone one day should put every game they ever made into 1 game. Where you as a game journalist have to review them. XD

27:58 bro that's literally Sherry Birkin from Resident Evil 2, I-I can't-

*doxxing, stalking and stealing content* RU-vid: “I sleep.” *not watching obnoxious and intrusive ads* RU-vid: “So you have chosen death.”

I think that school bus simulator was a ripoff of a normal bus simulator and they just changed the textures to make it more distinct. It'd explain why the stop spots are so random.

My guy is using Hylics 2 music? Wasn’t expecting it but MAN I fucking love that game