Scammers are stealing indie games and selling them on Steam

[Alfonso Maruccia]

The big picture: There's no denying that today's gaming world is extremely competitive. Indie developers have to fight tooth and nail for their place in the sun, but some people are still trying to cheat the system by repackaging and selling someone else's work.

As the largest digital store for PC games, Steam has to deal with its fair share of fraud attempts and sketchy content. A particularly nasty occurrence is related to games or even game prototypes that are stolen from indie developers and repackaged to be sold on Valve's massively popular platform.

A developer that goes by the name "Me" seems to be one of the worst offenders. The unknown dev took around 70 game projects from independent sources such as Itch.io, put them on Steam, and tried to make some money from it. Me's list of Steam games mostly contains unknown, amateurish content stolen from other people, though a few interesting titles are present as well.

The spammy developer took HardCop2, a game published by Tokagrien on itch.io, and published it on Steam in February 2021. Next is Dungeon Minesweeper Chronicles, which was created by Aftertea_time and released by Me on Steam in January 2025. Itch.io is a website focused on indie game experiences, a place where amateur developers can experiment or try to sell their own assets without having to deal with dedicated hosting duties.

Most of the "games" released by Me have now been removed from Steam, but Valve's store still hosts a few titles stolen and repackaged by this unknown scammer. A few games, such as Big Survivor, are free, while a weird 2D platformer named Artificial Gravity Cat costs $5.

Valve seems uninterested in actively going after Me or other scammers that blatantly try to abuse its service. Stolen titles get removed when fans or the original developers make a fuss. Indie creators are either forced to spend their own time and resources to regain IP control, or watch their content being abused by strangers and criminals.

The stolen, spammy content problem isn't exclusive to Steam or PC gaming, either. Massive console platforms, including Sony PlayStation and Nintendo Switch, have to deal with a significant volume of copycats, low-effort games, or knock-offs of popular experiences. Even console giants are doing very little to curb this annoying and frankly pathetic phenomenon, despite raking in billions through legit gaming sales.

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Scammers are stealing indie games and selling them on Steam

 

[m4a4]

I mean, I can't see how that wouldn't be a huuuuge burden on the platform to somehow make an accurate judgement call that the upload is without the owner's permission, and then to try vetting it for ownership.

Easier to let people report it and do the vetting then.

And then they probably should just ban the Steam account doing the scamming after 1 or 2 times. That said, it's also not hard to create a new account and continue on, making the $100 investment back (if the rightful devs aren't paying attention to their games)...

 

[Axeia]

I mean, I can't see how that wouldn't be a huuuuge burden on the platform to somehow make an accurate judgement call that the upload is without the owner's permission, and then to try vetting it for ownership.

Easier to let people report it and do the vetting then.

And then they probably should just ban the Steam account doing the scamming after 1 or 2 times. That said, it's also not hard to create a new account and continue on, making the $100 investment back (if the rightful devs aren't paying attention to their games)...

Combine that with withholding payments for the first month sales and if not legitimate paying it to the proper owner.
Might make a difference whilst being a minor convenience to Devs. Could even do it only to smaller unproven Devs so known good entities aren't affected.

 

[toooooot]

I mean, I can't see how that wouldn't be a huuuuge burden on the platform to somehow make an accurate judgement call that the upload is without the owner's permission, and then to try vetting it for ownership.

Easier to let people report it and do the vetting then.

And then they probably should just ban the Steam account doing the scamming after 1 or 2 times. That said, it's also not hard to create a new account and continue on, making the $100 investment back (if the rightful devs aren't paying attention to their games)...

They would spam these hoping to sell 1-2 copies before they account is banned. People get creative with scams. This is something Steam needs to take care of. Perhaps a deposit from a game dev that they will hold for x amount of months would help.

 

[m4a4]

Combine that with withholding payments for the first month sales and if not legitimate paying it to the proper owner.
Might make a difference whilst being a minor convenience to Devs. Could even do it only to smaller unproven Devs so known good entities aren't affected.

That's again assuming that the small time indie dev is paying proper attention.

They would spam these hoping to sell 1-2 copies before they account is banned. People get creative with scams. This is something Steam needs to take care of. Perhaps a deposit from a game dev that they will hold for x amount of months would help.

It costs $100 to start publishing on Steam (the investment I referenced). They'd still need to scam with tiny indie devs to make it back (and not have it immediately taken down), and then just have to get lucky once (to more than make up for that cost).