If you saw a listing for Helldivers 2 or Palworld at deep discounts on Steam this week, you may have been fooled into thinking there was a special sale going on. In fact, those "games" were, in fact, not Helldivers 2 or Palworld at all.
As PC Gamer reported, it looks like some devious groups changed the names and their full listings of a number of games on Thursday today to make people think they were Helldivers 2 or Palworld. The people behind this scam also created fake listings for games like Last Epoch and Escape from Tarkov, the latter of which is not even on Steam.
Eurogamer reports that Helldivers 2"s developer Arrowhead posted a message on its Discord channel this morning warning people about the fake Steam listings:
People posting as us trying to scam people is obviously very sad and frustrating, and for that as well as for security reasons we urge you to stay clear of them Again, the only two Helldivers 2 products we market are Helldivers 2 and Helldivers 2 Super Citizen Edition.
The good news is that Valve quickly stepped in to remove these fake Steam game listings. The bad news is that the "developers" behind this scheme (which we will not name here) still have other games listed on Steam as of this writing. It"s currently unknown if Valve will take action to ban these groups from publishing games on Steam completely.
In the meantime, if you do see a listing of a popular game on Steam that might have a lower price than usual, you should not try to purchase that title immediately. Instead, check the official social media outlets for the game in question to see if they are indeed discounting the game, and search Steam to see if there are multiple listings of the same game.