Sound similar to https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/BLsM7/new-type-of-scam
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Same guys doing it, this is why.
Abstractism was their fake CS:GO item store game, by the way, it just slipped past the TF2 debacle.
Gotta admit, a rather unique way to combat the ever-increasing inflation of the hryvnia, getting paid in USD and making everyone mine cryptocurrency for you.
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What if you would get in-game currency to buy more pixels with if you enable mining.
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Oh, if PUBG wouldn't be so notoriously shit in graphics optimisation, I would expect it to be sold fully to the Chinese who would then do exactly that.
Probably the only reason WoW and LoL aren't doing it is because they are located under US jurisdiction.
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I am not too deep into US law, but would it be illegal, if the ToS say it is doing the mining and there is an opt-out?
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I am somewhat sure it would be since you would be selling resources to the company and it would not give anything for it. Plus even if the ToS covers it, since the US is yet to invent actual consumer protection, the class action lawsuit would be big enough to be visible from Venus.
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Oh, that one is legal, yes. You can invest money, and sometimes, well, it just goes down the drain. It is a bit more difficult to get away with startups like this in some countries, but in the US, it is part of business.
Hiding a miner in a program is another business though. You are not signing up to be an investor, considering the company is not promising anything in return.
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You can also just use crowdfunding to get rich by doing nothing at all.
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Can you explain why are you referencing hryvnya? I did some quick googling and it looks like the "developer" is from Belarus.
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Looked Ukrainian to me. Especially with the Ukraine-referencing items they have now in the item store. Need to check again, apparently, when I have time again to dig into it.
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It seems to have just most "popular" stuff from the region. And the only place I see the country being mentioned (guide and group are made by developer)
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yeap, they are from Belarus.
Also I found In russian social network vk.com group https://vk.com/bgink where they
laugh at their customers who want to remove steam items from inventory
https://vk.com/bgink?w=wall-79964233_2880
same guys made this shit
https://store.steampowered.com/app/496500/Moon_Colonization_Project/
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week ago another one game with items removed for "store manipulation, attempts at exploiting vulnerabilities to ship unauthorized content, and using deceptive marketing practices."
https://steamcommunity.com/games/793720/announcements/detail/1689297920474184004
Dev of the game got trade ban.
Probably same will be with Abstractism devs xD
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Volvo should take action via law against them... maybe these guys were stupid enough to use real names etc...
Maybe we see something about this later in the press... :P
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Yep. I was just reading about this also... https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-07-30-steam-game-abstractism-turns-pcs-into-cryptocurrency-miners
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Valve recently stated in a Steam blog they would "allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or >>straight up trolling," yet it seems they are failing even in this regard. Perhaps most worryingly, the offending game in this incident was >>hardly subtle: the poorly-hidden malware, the brazen attempt to scam with fake TF2 items, and galleries of Pepe and Putin memes >>should have set alarm bells ringing long before the game was ever made available to the public.
Didn't know that memes are bad as malware and fake items. :D
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Someone posted a thread relating to this scam with the game Climber. https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/BLsM7/new-type-of-scam
Unfortunately this only seem like the start of it too.. :(
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I can see how valve will deal with this. They will just restrict a new game from being able to create any in-game item, or they just simply need to go through some sort of
verification method before they are allowed to create such item. This will spread faster than anyone can imagine and affect alot of people that arent familiar with trading or doesn't check forums too often.
Create awareness, post this as your steam status and save your friends.
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I can see how valve will deal with this. They will just restrict a new game from being able to create any in-game item, or they just simply need to go through some sort of
verification method before they are allowed to create such item.
That would require them to use their brains for something else than racking up the benjamins. Hence the probability of this actually happening is close to zero.
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Knowing Valve, they'll just set up a $100 entry fee per game to participate in the Community Market (recuperable after 1000 items have been sold), call it a job well done and get back to pretending there are no issues.
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Stop giving them ideas!!!
If they do such, it will kinda destroy the community market. I mean no one is going to pay $100 fee to sell their $10 worth item
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You can name it greed, envy, jealousy or anything else but when there's profits or money to be made; scamming is for some a habit. :O
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game removed from sale from steam ^^
All in-game items removed from market
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two games from same dev removed
679650 Removed store name – dead_file.exe
904660 Removed store name – Hentai Battle Royale™
dead_file.exe also had items and they also removed from market
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items removed not only from market, but also from steam inventory
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For the sake of SG users can we please petition for this game to be REMOVED from SG. I'm not sure if you can still download it but it is still on SG's giveaway list and it would be extremely bad if the dev where to appear and do a mass giveaway as a last ditch effort to scam people.
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Already have but generally speaking the more support something has behind it the more likely it will be done ...
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https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaways/wishlist/search?q=abstractism
404 place from thousands games on steam. People want this crap, so why u want "this game to be REMOVED from SG"?
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If the game (shockedfrog has informed me that it may not be accurate) has indeed got a cryptominer then it is essentially hazardous to everyone.
People who give the game away are basically an accessory to a crime.
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if the game has stolen assets and people make giveaway with this game - they are basically an accessory to a crime too.
So lets ban all games from otaku/gogo bundles?
It takes few seconds to check what game is in giveaway before entering. So if people want this game (check community wishlist) - let them have it
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If the dev drops the keys, then nothing will happen. The game is banned. People can add it, and it will not show as a +1 game, it cannot drop cards, it cannot have achievments, and it cannot have any item drops nor any remaining items be put on the market. It can only be downloaded and "played".
Although that mining aspect is still shitty. ⛏️
Okay, fuck it, you are right, let's ban this shit. 👮
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If your concern is regarding the miner, the game was analysed and no miner or malware was found, it was just Youtubers and their fans jumping to conclusions. The item scamming happened, but that doesn't really affect people who just want to own/play the game.
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It was? I haven't seen any of the news stories have any updates suggesting that? Where did you see the story, I'm interested in reading it is possible.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/937e7m/abstractism_has_been_removed_from_the_steam_store/e3dke8s/ - this thread also ended up covering Sid's other video where he also reported a false positive.
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Reddit does a better job than Kotaku, EuroGamer, etc who either didn't update the original article, never made an updated article or didn't make it easy to find.
Basically Reddit putting big news outlets to shame ... what has the world come to?
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Any link to the article(s) proving that the miner doesn't exist?
What I found with
"Of course this could just be a bad translation, as in the most recent update they reaffirm that the game is not a crypto-miner. They even provide instructions on how to turn off the functions that seem to be hogging gamer’s system resources, which would allow a user to play the game without burning out their system."
only makes it more questionable why there is a turn on-off system that causes players "burning out their system"
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It sure looks like it requires at least 4x Titans to run on "Ultra" settings... https://youtu.be/UyZV8xCbFzo?t=555
So even if they weren't mining, they were using all of your CPU and GPU for something else than the graphics while having constant unneeded network traffic on top.
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Where are you getting the network traffic claim from?
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Apparently from YouTube comments. The point still stands even without it. The game looks like Pong from 1972, it wouldn't max out a pocket calculator of today.
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Yeah, there was one Youtube comment in particular that got pinned on the video that really misled a lot of people. Amongst other issues with it, nobody else who's analysed the game has seen the network activity he was referring to.
While you're obviously exaggerating for comic effect, it's pretty clear from the video that there's effects going on that are far beyond old Ataris, and it's not unusual for a game to use more resources than expected due to poor coding and/or the lack of a frame limiter. At any rate, that seems moot anyway - hardly anyone who's actually played the game has reported unusual resource usage. There's a lot of comments around, including your own, which are basically parroting things said by a couple of people who made a lot of mistakes.
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They got quoted by several news articles about this whole mess, making it appear as many have already confirmed them. But I still can't see any of the effects you speak of, so do you have a video of them? All I have seen is line graphics that look simpler than what I did with 8bit BASIC in the 80s and this is not even an exaggeration. And the engine to make a square go in random directions hardly looks like it would require anything more either.
Still the biggest mistakes were by the devs, imagining that scamming people with fake items will end well. So at least no innocent people got hurt in the witch hunt for miners.
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Most of those news articles were also simply repeating things said elsewhere, and the more reputable ones generally made it clear that it was alleged and not confirmed.
The game's appearance is really besides the point here, but there's a bit more to that effect than it looks, and there's also a kind of chromatic abberation effect going on there if you look closely at the edges. Don't get me wrong, it's simple enough stuff and hardly the next Crysis, but it's far beyond the criticism it's gotten.
I've no interest in defending the dev given his other behaviour, but Sid made a followup video that's led to one seemingly innocent dev being attacked by his fans, and while people seem to be waking up to what's going on now, it's a troubling situation. Not just because of innocent devs suddenly being faced with ridiculous accusations, but also because if people are this bad at telling what isn't malware, they're going to be equally terrible at dealing with actual malware when it inevitably comes to Steam.
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All we needed for that kind of effect back then was using CRT TV as monitor and pure black&white became easily distorted. :)
People are usually terrible at dealing with malware no matter what the context. They install some malware like Norton and imagine it's protecting them because it bothers them all the time. But maybe this will teach devs to test their code against the common ones to avoid more hassle. And innocent devs might get some free marketing out of it if they are lucky and people also read that it wasn't a real thing.
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It's definitely something all devs should be doing, though it's not always fair to expect devs to be able to fix those issues when sometimes it's being caused by antiviruses either being developed lazily or used inappropriately.
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The way your quoted article puts it is more awkward than the dev put it, haha. All he said was that it may be caused by high graphics settings - which sounds weird considering that the game looks simple, but there are some effects going on when the game's in action and it's coded in an unusual and poorly optimized way, so it's feasible. At any rate, I didn't notice any unusual resource usage when playing the game myself.
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Thanks. I wasn't interested in the game at all so haven't got it, nor ever planned it, and it being gone the whole topic is just playing archeologist with topics and youtube videos :D
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Yeah, it's just worrying where this kind of thing leads - already there's been an innocent (though incompetent) dev attacked in a followup video, plus it's only a matter of time before someone tries to distribute actual malware through Steam and people aren't going to take the real threat seriously after all this crying wolf.
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For the record, since I have the game on my account, Steam returned the game code so you can play the game again. That should be confirmation enough that the game never had a crypto miner. I ran all the files through Kaspersky and MalwareBytes and they are clean, although some lesser AV programs still find false positives. The TF parody items were ill-advised (if not intentionally criminal), and the way the developer called the Steam API for item drops was against the Steam TOS but not for malicious reasons, but this crypto miner stuff was just crap to begin with. Clearly this YouTuber doesn't understand anything about anti-virus programs and other news outlets are so quick to clickbait "fake news", they re-reported it without fact checking. Sadly, this seems to be the state of media these days, and I don't see any of them "correcting the record" for their mistakes.
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It really doesn't help one bit if the dev confirms the suspections, later saying it was just a joke and of course after removing the malware in latest patch :P
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There was no malware. Maybe you should get your facts straight. Even watching that YouTuber's video it should have been obvious. The AVs he used in the first one, didn't even detect a crypto miner, it false detected a ransomware trojan (which is a very common false flag, showed up in GoG Myst IV as well as dozens of Steam games. But there are just too many Youtube personality apologists who just can't believe their favorite Youtubers can ever be wrong...
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So a dev saying there is malware is a sarcastic joke but me :P'ing it is a serious fact?
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Facts are facts, there was no malware. Whether it was sarcasm or anything else doesn't change that and is proof of nothing. Unless you are anyone else can show me the malware, it didn't happen. A handful of AVs claiming seven different viruses isn't proof.
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You are the only one arguing about it, you should read couple posts above.
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so, why does the game have 50 % cpu usage and 20 % gpu usage on main menu running on a quad-core and R270x?
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Because that happens with a lot of games using generic game engines. They leave the graphics with an uncapped frame rate, so it's trying to run at 1000 fps giving you the best graphics possible even though that is unnecessary for a simple graphics game like this. There are a number of old games that will do the exact same thing if a fix isn't applied. Try turning on VSync and capping the frame rate. Third-party programmers took the program apart. Check the Reddit thread for details. There is no crypto miner. That Youtuber likes to make grand assumptions based off insufficient evidence and you fell for his clickbait.
I own the game. I ran all the installed files through Kaspersky and Malwarebytes, both trustworthy AVs which do a good job minimizing false positives. They found nothing. There are no trojans, keyloggers, viruses or miners present. And it's not like this is a new game in the store either. It's been on the store since at least Mar. If there was anything really wrong with it (besides the TF look-alike items), it would have been discovered by someone more knowledgeable than a Youtuber who thinks if his virus program has a virus it's always real.
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I looked into this and learned something new myself. I didn't have the same experience with CPU usage - on my hexcore the game only used 5% CPU - but with my GPU (GTX 970), I noticed that while the game generally used 5-10%, it would sometimes spike to 20-30%, especially when idle. That certainly sounds suspicious at first - a lot of people would see that and think "it must be mining when idle!" - but what's actually happened is that the GPU's went into an idle/'2d' mode where it runs at lower clock speed. At a lower clock speed, the reported usage is higher, but it's based on what the graphics card can do at that lower clock speed. Have a look at that yourself - check what clock speeds your graphics card is running at while playing the game.
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That might make even more sense. I forget that the GPU (and even modern CPUs) will clock down under light loads. Guess that explains why opening Chrome spikes my CPU to 25% from idle. All I know is I've played a fair number of the "cheaper" games. And pretty much every game made on these premade game engines, report similarly high usages.
I just hate it when the Internet mobs watch a Youtube video or read one of these clickbait articles and then repeats it as if someone did a ton of fact-checking. I remember seeing some story about I think Gawker and they were talking to some of their former writers. They were saying that the requirement was to write a dozen stories a day and performance was based solely of how many clicks were generated. Doesn't leave a lot of room for fact-checking and definitely explains why so many stories shoot for outrage. All they were doing was scanning other news feeds, re-writing the original story quoting the source and pushing it out in their own platforms without checking a thing. Which kinda explains why half a dozen stories got written all quoting the Youtuber, yet none of them checked whether the game really had a crypto miner themselves.
I once tried to find one of those stories about Koreans dying from playing games at internet cafes. In the process of tracking it down, I found another article where someone tried to research the same thing, a story that got repeated all over the world. He ended up tracking it down and it all came from one single source, in a small Korean newspaper and when he contacted the local police for comment, there was no report that such a thing ever happened. Sadly, that is the state of today's journalism. Didn't some major newspaper get caught re-posting a story from the Onion as if it were true?
The fact the same Youttuber comes out a week later about another game and is wrong again, really irks me.
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And on the topic of "poorly programmed", that isn't necessarily the case just because of the resources they use. These programs are using bloated game engines like Unity or Clickteam Fusion. It doesn't matter if the game is as simple as Pong or as complex or similar to Witcher 3, there is the same minimum resources that are getting tied up through using that engine in the first place. Just because the game is simple doesn't mean it's not using the same resources as any other Unity game.
And maybe it's a fair criticism as to why you are using Unity to make a Pong clone, but then again, most one-man programming teams aren't going to write their own complete game engines either.
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Because they are mostly snake oil. The game uses same tool to encrypt/compress/etc the files as some malware did. So obviously everything that uses it becomes malware too. Analogy in real world would be someone carrying a bomb in IKEA plastic bag, so cops would flag everyone carrying one as a bomber.
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That and there are tens if not 100's of thousands of definitions.
If you have a one in a million false positive rate but are looking for 100,000 variants, the odds of any false detection becomes about 1 in 10.
And maybe it's the conspiracy theorist in me, but I often wonder if some of these programs leave the false positives intentionally. That way people see the AV "working" all the time and think it's protecting them better than the ones who only spot the real thing.
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And maybe it's the conspiracy theorist in me, but I often wonder if some of these programs leave the false positives intentionally. That way people see the AV "working" all the time and think it's protecting them better than the ones who only spot the real thing.
Anti-virus potential threat detection algorithms are rather complex and overly inclusive by design. It's better for the user if there are false positives every now and then because of the very small chance it detects something really nasty, since in the time between the AV team isolates the threat and publishes the definitions there's a lot of potential harm they could do.
The only way to detect false positives and amend them is by finding them in the wild and checking, which most of the time happens when a user of the AV software sends it for analysis. As such, the bigger AV companies have an edge on that aspect, and that's why the smaller ones never seem to fix their false detections.
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Yeah, I wonder about that myself sometimes. Antiviruses are often free for a reason, and while the more legit reason is that they rely on a wide user base to help them detect new viruses, it looks like there's a whole lot of things going on for the sake of competition and upselling that's understandable from a business perspective but does end up frustrating coders and misleading users.
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On top of what's been said, antiviruses are aimed at a whole range of users and often weren't made with gaming in mind. Even when there's a 'game mode' it's often an afterthought or causes more problems than it fixes.
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Quality control? nah
https://steamcommunity.com/market/listings/936410/AWP%20%7C%20Dragon%20Lore
good job, Valve, good job
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xClkx9UzsmE
https://steamcommunity.com/app/781600/discussions/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/781600/Abstractism/
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