Crappy Games Keep Trying To Steal PUBG’s Name On Steam

Crappy Games Keep Trying To Steal PUBG’s Name On Steam

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds? That’s old hat. These days, I’m all about, um, *checks list* PlayerUnkn1wn: Friendly Fire, PlayerUnkn4wn: Zombie and Battle Pixel’s Survival.

Over the past few months, a handful of games with names suspiciously similar to PUBG have made it onto Steam, seemingly undeterred by silly things such as Valve’s strenuous approval process (lol) or trademark infringement. The names I listed off above are real, and that isn’t even all of them. PC Gamer found others, such as Gamers Unknown Survival. Each and every one, though, is a blatant, hacked-together rip-off of either PUBG or DayZ.

Now, here’s where it gets extra dodgy. I decided to do some searching on Steam with these games’ names in mind. I tried shorter forms of “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds“, as well as common misspellings. I found that, in many cases, these Original Content, Do Not Steal games pop up before PUBG, if PUBG even appears at all. Here, for example, is what happened when I searched “player unknown”:

Crappy Games Keep Trying To Steal PUBG’s Name On Steam

That one is almost understandable, if a fairly damning appraisal of Steam’s search engine. But then I searched “pubg”, and all I got was this:

Crappy Games Keep Trying To Steal PUBG’s Name On Steam

Then I tried “player unknown battleground”, and oh hey, look who popped up again:

Crappy Games Keep Trying To Steal PUBG’s Name On Steam

But wait, how did Battle Pixel’s Survival get on there when it contains none of the words in the original game’s title? As far as I can tell, it managed this feat of search-engine hacking by cramming its description full of phrases such as “multiplayer unknown battle ground”. I looked into the developer’s background, and of the five games it’s released, four – Battle Pixel’s Survival, Two Draw, Pixel Day: Gun Z and Pixel Z: Gun Day (yes, seriously) – are misleading copycat games.

Most people, I imagine, won’t fall for this Fisher-Price’s My First Highway Robbery-level scam, but the fact that it’s this easy is not a great look for Steam. Anyway, now you know, and knowledge is power when it comes to games named after a player nobody knows, but who, in reality, everyone knows now.


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