Fake Ubisoft games show up on Steam

Assassin’s Creed fans are eagerly awaiting Assassin’s Creed Mirage, the upcoming game in the franchise that takes place in Baghdad.

Ubisoft hasn’t set a release date for the game yet, so someone decided to release multiple fake Steam pages for the company’s upcoming titles while charging Steam users $33.99 for what seemed like a mistake on Ubisoft’s part.

Steam App ID 2384540 initially branded itself as Assassin’s Creed Mirage but then switched its name, description, and images to Pirateland.

Global Development and their publisher, Global Entertainment, are behind Pirateland‘s Steam page. They also made Fantasy of Medieval, which initially looked like Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones, and the most bizarre one, Racer, which pretended to be a video-game adaptation of Kurtlar Vadisi, a Turkish television drama.

The games used AI-generated images to simulate modern video-game graphics, with Pirateland seemingly using actor Josh Duhamel’s likeness without his permission.

Youtuber Patrick Steel purchased Pirateland and checked the game’s contents, only to find absolutely nothing. The game wouldn’t launch or uninstall itself due to the lack of any .exe files in its Steam folder.

All games showed up on April 28th, 2023, on Steam, but had their release dates set back to make it look like they came out a while ago.

You can browse the archived Steam pages for Pirateland, Racer, and Fantasy of Medieval using the Wayback Machine.

Creators can pay Valve $100 USD to put their games on Steam, but clearly this system is flawed, and there isn’t anyone actually checking if these games are real or not.

Steam is a respectable platform that has existed for two decades, so it’s disappointing to see that the platform is now having to deal with scams and crypto miners embedded in games.