Sentinels of the Store have done something amazing:

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/groups/Sentinels_of_the_Store/announcements/detail/4222762959836264571

Yep, FadyGames is one of the shell accounts in used by a new(old?) asset flipper on the scene.

The asset flipper shell accounts are as follows:

FadyGames
Hardi
Lieb
Daniel Li

Each of these shell accounts are linked through metadata proving they're basically the same guy.

Each account has about 4 games, all asset flips, and every game has around 10 fake/paid reviews from compromised review accounts (Moyano, Charmer, etc etc).

My suspicion is that this is Reforged Group/Galescorp/ImperiumGame returning after all his other accounts got banned for pulling the "Fake Palworld" scam. I don't think it's Atomic Fabrik because the asset flips are all in Russian/English only.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2865910/BLACK_WEREWOLF/
Another garbage $30 game from FadyGames.

Oh and this is fun, having a look at Conglomerate 5, we can see that's an alias for Atomic Fabrik. So what's he doing co-publishing games by Gales Corp/Imperium Game? And since he's so closely related, why wasn't he banned too?

Oh, they missed one!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1385350/Clowns/

Published by Conglomerate 5, but Galescorp/Garage Games etc are behind the actual asset flip. So Valve didn't want to mess with Conglomerate 5?

It's highly likely they are one and the same (Wow wow/Phoenixxx)

D'oh, I forgot about Phoenixxx... yeah, maybe those $30 are from them. Can I go back to 2 minutes ago when I forgot they existed? Please?

It's still not clear what broke the camels back for Valve. Sentinels of the Store are speculating that there's a relationship between Gales Corp and the rest of those Russian accounts in the syndicate, and the posting of duplicate "fake" games which happened over the last week or so... someone put up games called "Palworld" and so on, copying the pricing and other game store assets, and got paid quite a lot of money from fake sales.

Valve refunded the money and banned the scammers, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if Valve had found a connection and decided to finally clean up.

As for Wow wow/Phoenixxx... I guess they are just unrelated and haven't broken enough rules yet to get banned. We can only hope.

I hadn't seen AfoGames/Lieb before. I have no doubt it's the same modus operandi as Gales Corp and his many, many shell accounts. We can only assume that amongst all his shell accounts, he was careful enough with some of them that Valve weren't able to establish a connection.

wow wow games are still up too, UGH:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2415660/Raventure/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2107270/Closed_Island/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1770360/Desert_Magic_Adventures/

Wow... awesome news! Checking the absolute garbage $30 games recently are all gone now too. Let's see...

Some samples that have been removed (might not have been Gales Corp):
Deep Cave - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1844190/Deep_Cave/
Lost Alien - https://store.steampowered.com/app/2556590/Lost_Alien/
My Evil Clones - https://store.steampowered.com/app/2743870/My_evil_clones/
Red Conquer - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1871340/Red_Conquer/
Size It - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1859610/Size_It/

I'm pretty sure these are Gales Corp garbage, or a very similar company, STILL ON STEAM FOR $30?!?!:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2808770/Library_Fantasy/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2808780/OPERATION_TEMPLE/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2815960/Robzawar/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2808790/Search_of_the_Source/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2810120/Traveler_Eternal_Night/

Great news, Valve banned Gales Corp/Garage Games/Reforged Group/ImperiumGame and all his other shell accounts over the weekend. 290+ garbage games removed.

That's a good catch... it's no surprise there was some asset re-use there.

As the top reddit comment says, it's not the asset re-use that's the problem.

It just happens that asset flipping, plagiarism and all sorts of other unethical behaviour go hand-in-hand.

Ya'll probably heard of the disastrous launch of The Day Before and it got lots of assets bought from the unreal marketplace. I'm not sure if this is completely an asset flip game but it's shady non the less.
Btw here's the reddit post listing all the assets bought by the devs:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDayBefore/s/x0xEuuH2TD

That entire description is just a template where they have an "Insert Name Drop Here" and just plunked "The Matrix" in for this walking simulator (I know it's an asset-flip, you're supposed to add a damned game around the assets!)

They seriously say, "One of the most fantastic aspects of this game is the day and night cycle ..." `Alternate Reality: The City` from 1985 had a cool day/night cycle for the time... I don't know why that would be a selling point for a supposedly "new" game 38 years later.

Here's an amazing one... The Matrix by Epic Games!

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/app/2642630/discussions/0/3882724699530440492/

It's a Russian asset flipper who called his account "Epic Games", and he's used a flipped city asset and called it The Matrix.

Asset flips, all of them, review manipulation, priced for money laundering, the developer is Russian. There's no co-incidences.

All we can see is the Steam store metadata from the game, and it looks like he's carefully set up a new account, new email address etc.

Valve don't do any background checks on developers, there's no "KYC" or other identification. Valve stores banking details for the developer, but this is something we'll never see, it's likely they carefully set up new bank accounts with a new identity because they obviously don't want Valve to know who they are while they busily use Steam to launder roubles.

We can connect developer accounts when they co-operate financially by putting games in bundles like this one:

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/8236/Mega_Bundle/

Everyone who contributed to that bundle is co-operating financially and profit sharing. This means they know each other, and in a lot of cases it's probably just different shell accounts.

Is there some way to look up these companies, BTW, to see if they're anybody from the "old crowd" or their own company? I found another company, VDani, that is selling lots of $59 crap Game Maker games as well, most with exactly 10 positive reviews, as is their way.
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=Vdani

Give me a little time and I'll do some digging in the metadata. Certainly looks like the work of Russian GameMaker Studio asset flippers. HEDE usually sticks to Unity, but it's very likely to be the galescorp/galeszooka/GamesForGames/HotFoodGames/Reforged Group syndicate

I found these doing more discovery queues. Two companies that weren't in my database, but they are absolute beginner-quality games that are all charging $59.00 USD, all released on April 10th, which makes me think they're all by the same "developer", possibly HEDE or galeszooka.
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=flummox
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=stoun3

By all means post them here if you like, the more information we share the more we can work out what these people are doing polluting Steam with all these trash games.

I can agree, that's why I created a group a few days ago to highlight good indie games. It's always a good thing to help indie developers who put out good quality games that aren't asset flips or shovelware

So that's pretty obviously an insincere/joke game intended for the "developer" to get a few bucks from people jumping onto the bandwagon, streamers or something just setting out for a cash grab.

It's obviously not sincere and is intended to misuse Steam for profit by dumping more pollution and garbage onto the store. This is bad for gamers because it makes it hard for gamers to find genuine, sincerely made games, and it's harmful to genuine amateur game developers because it makes it harder for their products to find an audience.

In that particular case, while the game isn't available, it's very clearly an asset flip from Unreals "Easy Survival RPG" asset pack.

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/easy-survival-rpg

Nice group :-) Here is another one for you: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1569130/Asset_Flip/

Love your HEDE reviews! I had the unfortunate incident of playing some of his HOG games.

Well, the general theory is that these games are priced this way for money laundering purposes. It's no co-incidence these bundles and overpriced games all come from Russian asset flippers.

Pretend you're a Russian "game developer" for a minute, and you have all these stolen credit cards, so of course you make up a bunch of Steam accounts, dump a free asset pack onto Steam for $100, then you use your other accounts to buy copies of the game at maximum price. Valve gets their 30% cut, and you've "cleaned" all your stolen credit card money as legitimate income from Steam.

There's no evidence to back it up, but it's the front running theoretical explanation.

This is a good video showing one of these asset flips with a ludicrous price hitting Steam top seller charts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFmBT_Avf48&t=580s

Were hundreds of people paying hundreds of dollars for an asset flip on Steam because they thought it was a great game?

theres one for 200 euros but reduced to 20 because it probably sells like garbage.

First thought: Of course it's HEDE games.
Second thought: Why the hell are almost all of these $99?!?!?

i just found the worst bundle on steam https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/20620/ALL

It's something I've noticed too, and it's a big problem.

There's a correct process for developers to publish demos for games:

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos

But the more shady developers bypass this process, because they want to use the "free sample" to advertise their game. This is not good for gamers, it's against the general intention of the Steam marketplace (because Valve has a clear process for demos).

This is very harmful because it's another example of shady developers taking up marketing space and choking off the air supply for genuine developers who are doing the right thing.

I don't know if this belongs here or in its own discuss or what, but aside from the fact that prologues have been proliferating like crazy on Steam clogging it up EVEN MORE with dupes of the same damned game, I just saw something that is probably going to show up more often and even further exacerbate the issue:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2015040/Ignited_Steel_Prologue/

This is a Prologue for v1.1 of a game that was released 7 months before it... which also, on its own main page, has a demo to download. So now there are pre-release Prologues (the demo, which came out on Feb 21st), the actual game release (Mar 9th), and a well-past-release rerelease Prologue (Oct 14th). We're probably going to start seeing the same darned games several times now as several separate Steam releases so they can keep Valve's algorithms showing up as "New Releases".

Argh!

I have the connection between Andreev Worlds and GamesForGames but I haven't looked much deeper yet. It's on the list. When I've gone through the crazy wall I'll publish what I've found because it's fascinating to see all the connections.

Do you have Andreev Worlds on your radar? Seem to be entangled with GamesForGames but their games are just poorly made, not asset flips.

One can only imagine what turns these people to evil

FALCO Software is Valery Sokolov, from Tomsk, Russia.

{LINK REMOVED}http://www.herdprotect.com/signer-valery-sokolov-05c4.aspx

Seems he used to be an actually skilled developer before he started to publish asset flips:

{LINK REMOVED}https://programmer.falcoware.com/

Great to see that we can inform and influence gaming media just by putting the honest truth out there.

Also of interest an article in Russian about kovalevvictor:

{LINK REMOVED}https://dtf.ru/flood/851137-kak-prodavat-besplatnye-assety-chuzhie-demki-i-onlayn-igry-steam-izdatel-kovalevviktor

It even features reviews by Obey the Fist! and also identifies some of the sources we didn't even know about. So even the Russians are onto these scammers.

Kazakov is located in Noworsibirsk, Russia and runs a wedding photography studio:

{LINK REMOVED}https://bagra.ru/?city=novosibirsk&lang=en&razdel=kommunalnye--bytovye--ritualnye-uslugi&cat=videostudii&organizaciya=kazakovstudio-videostudiya-4257090

The email is the same as the support email on Steam. Maybe add this to your evidence.

I haven't gone through Kazakov yet, but it will be no shock, a cursory look shows they have exactly the same MO as kovalevviktor and khukhrovr.

A bunch of asset flips from "solo" developers, overpriced/cash grab priced games, and ties to NL Studio and again, FALCO, and all the baggage that comes along with it.

Given they have exactly the same MO, all do the same things and have tenuous connections to each other, it's either the same person or a syndicate of asset flippers.

This all makes me think that kazakov isn't connected to all the others, because they disappeared around when the Ukraine war started. Anyways, you definitely have been tracking these companies quite a bit!

kovalevviktor is similar to khukhrovr, but not directly related. Massively inflated game prices for a series of asset flips from different "solo" developers, serial review manipulation. However, what was interesting was one particular title published by kovalevviktor but developed by FALCO Software, and FALCO is a serious Russian asset flipper with a number of flipped titles under their belt... this relationship can't be overlooked, they know each other or are the same person. Now, FALCO works with Laush Studio, Big Black Bear etc... and of course, Big Black Bear work as a publisher for some of the ImperiumGame / HotFoodGames / GamesforGames / Reforged Group syndicate of GameMaker Studio money launderers. So there's a tenuous connection there.

Phoenixxx Games (AKA PHX Games) are also an interesting one... all asset flips, again, overpriced, but no fake/paid reviews. They self publish their own games and don't generally share, but they got caught out holding hands with one of the nastiest asset flippers/scammers out there, "Kuko", a Russian flipper and review manipulator. They co-published "King of Dragon Balls" together. Regardless, it's clear they're acting without integrity based on all the asset flip garbage and cash grab pricing.

It's funny you should ask about that as I've been building a "crazy wall" to connect all these bad actors together.

khukhrovr is an interesting one. They slipped up, and we know they are the same asset flipper as OnBlind who had quite a few unabashed asset flips. OnBlind published "HUNTERS FOR YOUR BRAIN", but the game goes to khukhrovr's publisher page. khukhrovr is a serial review manipulator, almost every game has fake reviews, and they're also crazy overpriced ($50 in some cases) for Unity or GameMaker Studio asset flips. Most of khuhkrovr's games come from single title developers, however, so I think they're just grabbing any game from any indie dev they can find and making a cash grab out of it on behalf of the "developers".

@E.Wolf1850 That's gotta be it! In one of the frames, the letter "p" is very clear. So it's probably a preview version of the road texture assets. How silly.

@Obey the First! Thanks for the info. I've know about Tero Lunkka for a long time, but didn't realize there were all of those connections to the other companies. Good to know.

Since we're on the topic, does anybody know if khukhrovr, Phoenixxx Games, or kovalevviktor have anything to do with Gales Corp? They all seem very, very similar.

Well I guess that does put things into a different perspective, yet the asset flippers are relentless about this.

It can't be true they "enjoy" dumping endless copy+paste games onto Steam so there has to be some financial incentive for them to do it.

Correction: over 1000 bundle sales are needed on DIG to recoup the Steam fee.

Personal anecdote: I have one of my games on DIG. It's handcrafted and while it's using assets it's not an asset flip. It's not a great game by all means but it's not complete trash either, has proper graphics, Steam integration and so on.

I sold about 180 units to a total of $19 on DIG so far with most of the revenue coming from one bundle where I got 10 cents each.

On Steam I made $80 from just 46 sales.

I don't see how these asset flippers can make money off DIG more than they can make on Steam. I mean you need to sell over 100 units just to get back the Steam fee, and that's not counting the price of the assets you flipped (if they purchased them).

I would imagine they make most of their money from Robert Muresan who runs DailyIndieGame. I'd be very surprised if they make much money from direct Steam sales (although the presence of all the fake/paid reviews shows they care about review scores!).

Also they might be using offshore accounts for their Steam developer transactions.

I wouldn't be surprised if part of the purpose of consolidating to "Reforged Group" was also to guarantee they can bypass sanctions.

I'd really like to know how Russian flippers still make money given they can't really get transactions from Valve anymore (nor can they pay Steam Direct fees). Maybe that's the connection to Tero Lunkka who isn't under sanctions?

I doubt Tero Lunkka stole textures. More likely the environment is simply asset flipped entirely. While these ... things ... on the texture look strange I couldn't read any watermark.