“#SOS” is a series of articles dedicated to any form of anti-consumer/deceptive practices partaken on different Steam games, ranging from things such as developers hiding their involvement with games due to a dark past on Steam, developers censoring user’s opinions and other things of the sort.
At the beginning of 2017, Valve started to come down hard on a number of different developers attempting to manipulate the Steam marketplace or review policy of the Steam store, and sometimes for being dubbed as “hostile” towards their customers. This resulted in Valve cutting ties with a great number of developers for aforementioned reasons, primarily for developers employing bots to farm the games to place the items dropped by the games, such as trading cards, onto the Steam community marketplace and/or developers setting up alternate accounts and writing fake positive reviews for their own product, essentially exploiting Valve’s systems and manipulating consumers to reach a misguided judgement to buy a game,
On that note, let me introduce you to an indie developer that faced Valve’s wrath, Corporation F. Corporation F published a game called Ivan vs. Nazi Zombies onto the Steam Store, a first-person shooter developed with the GameGuru engine that was heavily criticised by the Steam community due to its bad graphics, generic gameplay and short length, which even lead to someone doing a speedrun of the game, completing it in two minutes and twenty seconds. Ivan vs. Nazi Zombies is no longer available to purchase on the Steam store, due to the developer’s business ties being cut by Valve. Valve never gave a public statement regarding why they cut business ties with Corporation F, however if you attempt to view one of the marketplace items for Ivan vs. Nazi Zombies, it will read: “This item can no longer be bought or sold on the Community Market because Valve no longer has a business relationship with the developer.” The only thing aside from the now unusable marketplace items that remains of Ivan vs. Nazi Zombies is its old Steam Greenlight page.
Despite the developer being effectively banned by Valve from doing any business on the Steam store, developer Corporation F has made an attempt at circumventing Valve’s ban, by using a different developer/publisher name and different contact e-mail addresses. Let me introduce you to Corporation F’s new alias “Superb Games Inc.” Superb Games Inc. has launched two games onto the Steam store, these games being Storm in Desert and The Dark Tales of Katarina, the latter of which is placed under a slightly altered name of Superb Games Inc. known instead as “Guardian Superb Games Inc.” The ties towards this development alias being Corporation F can be found on Super Games Inc.’s Greenlight page. Additionally, if any altercations are made to the Greenlight workshop of Superb Games Inc. at a later date, the same information can be retrieved on the site Greenlight Updates. On Superb Games Inc.’s Greenlight workshop, there is a game there called “Return of Ivan vs. Zombies” an intended sequel for Ivan vs. Nazi Zombies by Corporation F. Additionally, the game seems to be sharing a lot of the same base GameGuru assets as the original had when the game is placed into comparison with the original.
Additionally, these are not the only names that Corporation F appears to be going under on the Steam Store. There is another game on the Steam store called “Anime Berry Match-Three” which is developed and published by Siberia Games, but Siberia Games is actually just another name used by Superb Games Inc./Corporation F. Evidence of the connection between the two previous names and Siberia Games can be found on the Steam support pages for the games, since both games by the two supposedly “different” developers share the same support e-mail address.
Credit goes to SirViolentDeath for the information.
Update 15/08/2017: As of the 15th August 2017, Superb Games Inc. and their alternative developer names have been removed from the Steam store. Confirmation was given by a Valve employee via e-mail that the reason behind the removal was due to the links the name had with Corporation F. Additionally, Superb Games Inc. came with a comment on the situation saying “we have nothing to do with the original Ivan vs. Zombies Nazis. Just like you see, we do not have censorship for reviews. If you don’t like our games – this is your opinion. But the company “Corporation F” and we are absolutely different companies and people. The different names of publishers in the word “Guardian” in The Dark Tales of Katarina and Storm in Dessert are just a mistake. Thank you for noticing this. Now everything is fixed and the publisher’s name is displayed correctly.”
Comments (7)
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Posted 13 Aug 2017, 11:15
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Posted 13 Aug 2017, 13:29
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Posted 13 Aug 2017, 17:59
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Posted 15 Aug 2017, 19:56
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Posted 16 Aug 2017, 10:47
Edited your comment to make the url clickable btw
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Posted 14 Aug 2017, 12:34
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Posted 14 Aug 2017, 12:53