Darkest Dungeon has been one of the hottest, hardest games to see release in the new year. Despite being an Early Access title, the psychologically-traumatic dungeon-crawler debuted as one of the top-selling games on Steam and has stayed there since its debut. That must be why a scammer has a shady $US3.99 listing up on the official Windows app store.
One look at the dubious point-of-sale page — credited to one Balaji Chowdary — for Darkest Dungeon and it’s apparent that it’s a fake. Among other things, the listing shows a file size of 2.0 MB, a age rating of 3+ and a bizarre description. For comparison’s sake, the real game on Steam is about 900 MB and goes for $US19.99 On the Reddit thread where the fake is being discussed, Redditors speculate that this might be a way to distribute malware or a virus.
Members of dev studio Red Hook Games — who are the real creators of of Darkest Dungeon have been warning folks of this version as well.
Please ensure you purchase the game from Steam or Humble. Scams have been reported and we are checking into them.
— Darkest Dungeon (@DarkestDungeon) February 22, 2015
If anyone has a contact at Windows Game Store, please share. Somebody is scamming DD by selling it (illegally) on there.
— Red Hook Tyler (@tylersigman) February 22, 2015
On a related note, if you didn’t buy Darkest Dungeon on Steam or Humble Store right now, you got scammed.
— Red Hook Tyler (@tylersigman) February 22, 2015
Meanwhile, the seller who’s trying to pass off this fake also also has other video games that are clearly scams, Watchmen: The End Is Nigh and Lego Batman 3 among them. As has happened before on the Apple App Store and Google Play storefronts, this looks like a case of inconsistent moderation letting folks with bad intent get through the gates. Kotaku has reached out to Red Hook Games and Microsoft for comment and will update this story if they respond.
Comments
11 responses to “Scammer Is Selling Fake Games On The Windows Store”
They really, really need to get this shit sorted before they roll Windows10 out the door.
It happens and has happened on every platform before. This isn’t isolated to Windows.
Yeah, but it will be a shitstorm with Windows 10 if people use the Windows Store and it becomes a malware fest. The Store is going to be a much bigger part of 10 than previous releases. I hope they keep it nice and clean.
Yeah it happens. But this guy has a bunch of these scams. How does that happen?
You’d think someone at ms would have figured this out before now and would have completely banned him from the windows store.
The darkest dungeon game looks like it is gone but game Dev tycoon and Lego batman 3 are still there (based on a search of scammers name).
If ms get told about a scammer you’d think they would look into all the stuff he has on their store and not just the one item and turn a blind eye to the rest.
Google Play is terrible and if not worst. You think having near a 1 million apps you’re not going to get crap and dodgy ripoffs. MSFT should do something, but being quiet about the other contenders is negligent as they should always be mentioned when inline of such statement. No company is perfect but they should always strive for that moving target.
It’s not exclusive to Windows but it’s far more prominent because their store lacks a lot of official apps and games to bump the fakes off the top of charts and searches. After Candy Crush made the jump to WP years later than Android/iOS, I checked to see if its sequel (Candy Crush Soda Saga) also made the leap but all I found were fakes and scam apps. Ditto with Threes, where there are multiple scams, and I don’t mean ‘clones’ like 2048, but actual fakes that used the name and official logo. It’s even more ridiculous and unforgivable now that Microsoft’s actually doing business with the Threes people for their Xbox port.
Dig a bit deeper and the WP/Windows store is even more of a rat’s asshole. Countless fakes that only say ‘this is only a guide of Popular Mobile Game’ in the fine print, many of which are paid apps; this is the equivalent of those ‘bid on photo of X’ eBay scams. There’s even a cottage industry of emulated GBA games on WP. Yes, not every platform has its bad apples but Windows has it worse. The approval process for these stores is largely automated, but if something called ‘Candy Crush’ gets submitted, that should set off a red flag for someone to investigate its legitimacy. Even if they can’t do that, they should be actively culling these fakes which linger for months and years; the conspiracy theorist in me suspects that Microsoft doesn’t mind being tardy because it plumps up their app store numbers. This will become a bigger problem once they fully merge their stores in W10 and the fakes double up in visibility.
Do people actually use any of the Windows 8+ apps? First thing I go is run the powershell to remove them all. Makes logging on new users so quick.
I use solitaire. That is the only one. I still liked the Windos 7 version of all the solitaire games better though.
I don’t, but I’m pretty sure I would if I had a touchscreen laptop or a tablet.
I used to use Xbox Music for the free streaming, but that’s moot now they removed that part of it.
I do, even on my non-touch laptop. I use NextGen Reader, the best RSS interface I’ve found on any platform, and AU Weather Pro. Occasionally others, but these get usage everyday.
Windows app store is not efficient enough. That’s why we created AppFeds.com to avoid bad/scam apps.