Steam is dealing with spam. Valve’s platform has been flooded with games stolen from itch.io

I used to think the PlayStation Store was the worst when it came to cheap, crappy games and obvious knock-offs of popular titles. I was pretty sure nothing could beat the endless stream of junk clogging up that platform. But I was way off – Steam has its own crowd of sketchy developers.

Fake publishers are exploiting game platforms

There’s a developer who goes by “me” that publishes games on Steam under the same name ( sometimes the publisher is listed as “myself”). This developer/publisher combo has put out nearly 70 games. That could sounds impressive, until you realize most of these games seem to be stolen from developers on Itch.io, a platform where you can upload and sell your indie games.

Source: Steam

Here are a few examples to illustrate:

1. HardCop2 came out on Steam in February 2021, but the exact same game is available on Itch.io, created by Tokagrien.
2. Next we have Dungeon Minesweeper Chronicles that was released on Steam in January 2025, but it was actually created by Aftertea_time.
3. Open Star Fighter, published in April 2025, was developed by thelastflapjack.

The good news is that most of these ripped-off games have been taken down from Steam, so now they only show up on SteamDB, but not all of them are gone. And it looks like it’s not really Valve going after this shady developer, but the indie devs themselves.

Related:Nintendo Switch 2 sells 5 million units in first month becoming the fastest-selling console of all time

On PS Store, there's a massive wave of low-effort titles from sketchy developers, many of them clearly made with AI, like that Titanic Escape Simulator game whose trailer went viral a few weeks ago. There are also tons of knock-offs trying to ride the success of well-known games. For example, after R.E.P.O. became a huge hit on Steam, a bunch of cheap copycats started popping up on the PS Store. Same thing happened with Chained Together. Some of those rip-offs were eventually taken down, but not really by Sony – it was mostly players and the original devs reporting them.

Now, we’re seeing the same kind of mess on Steam. Developers are having to fight to protect their own games because the platform itself doesn’t seem capable of catching or preventing this kind of abuse.

The Nintendo Store isn’t safe from these scammy games either. In fact, SwitchStars on YouTube has made a few videos calling out fake eShop publishers. Part of the problem is that there’s really no solid vetting process for publishers on any of these platforms.

• Steam
• Nintendo
• PS Store / PlayStation Store
• copyright
• scams