Beware fake Helldivers 2 pages on Steam promising steep discounts

It's a tale as old as time: when a great, popular game rises to the top of the Steam charts, scammers and chancers will do everything in their power to steal some of that glory for themselves. The latest victim is Helldivers 2, with scammers putting up two separate fake pages for it on Steam over the last 24 hours. Each page listed Arrowhead as the developer, and PlayStation as the publisher, along with big discounts of 50-75% off to tempt players into buying the cheap version instead of the real one.

Warnings about the fake pages surfaced on Reddit earlier this morning, with Xwitter user Wario64 providing additional screengrabs of at least one of the Steam pages as well as their corresponding SteamDB update logs.

Looking at Wario64's screengrabs, you can clearly see how the SteamDB page for a game that was formerly called Figurality had its name, developer, publisher and store description changed to match that of the official Helldivers 2 store page. Heck, looking at the page right now myself (see my own screengrab below), a lot of the fake Helldivers information is still present there, though SteamDB has also flagged that this title is fake and that it's no longer available on the Steam store front.

Valve have since scrubbed the fake pages from Steam. The same Reddit thread also suggests that fellow Steam mega hit Palworld had a similarly fake Steam page as of yesterday, though a quick search of the Steam store now suggests that this, too, seems to have been taken down now.

According to our friends at Eurogamer, developers Arrowhead have alerted players in their Discord, urging them to be mindful of any further fake pages.

"People posting as us trying to scam people is obviously very sad and frustrating, and for that as well as for security reasons we urge you to stay clear of them," said Arrowhead's community manager. "Again, the only two Helldivers 2 products we market are Helldivers 2 and Helldivers 2 Super Citizen Edition."

It's a sorry state of affairs, and one of the dangers of Valve being so hands-off with how Steam is run. Arrowhead went on to say that Valve responded "very swiftly" once alerted, but it's clear there's still more that can be done to try and crack down on this nonsense. While it's perhaps unreasonable to expect Valve to approve each and every store page change in order to help prevent circumstances like this from happening again, I do think it's reasonable to have at least some safeguards in place to protect developers against such obvious scam attempts.

Helldivers 2 (the real one) is available on Steam for £35/€40/$40. It earned a Bestest Best from our Ed in his Helldivers 2 review, where he said its "Impeccable action and clever details make this a rare breed of live service co-op shooter".