This week Valve pulled a game titled “Earth: Year 2066” from its Steam store and began offering anyone who purchased the game full refunds.
Touted as a “sci-fi apocalyptic open-world where your main aim is to survive.” The game, which was published on Steam with the help of the Greenlight program, has been accused of being a scam by reddit users, members of the video game press and Steam’s own community. Earth: Year 2066’s developer, Killing Day Studios, has no real contact information to speak of with attempts to get in touch with the developer ending cold.
Jim Sterling’s video review of the game shows us a title with poor visuals, jittery camera movements, next to no animations and gameplay that’s broken at best. Some users have complained the controls just flat out don’t work. It’s speculated that the title was built overnight using Unity’s free tools and placed on early access with false promises of better builds in the future.
Earth: Year 2066 falsely promoted itself using stolen artwork from James Schadderton who illustrated images of his own vision of a post-apocalyptic Manchester for individual print sale. Even the original trailer, used during Earth: Year 2066’s indiegogo campaign (then called Project Earth) was stolen from game developer Don Quixote Studio. When a Steam user would complain to Earth: Year 2066’s forums they would find their posts edited, while several dummy accounts and direct friends of the developer left reviews praising the game’s graces.
An edited Steam post. Though there’s a breadcrumb trail of quotes that show what the thread originally looked like.
The game has been available since April 16th, and after a steady stream of complaints, an aggressive reddit campaign and fears this was all a get rich quick scheme, Valve finally pulled it on May 6th. A Valve employee named Chris D also responded to Earth: Year 2066 with some notes on Valve’s policy. Stating:
On Steam, developers make Their Own Decisions about promotion, features, pricing and publication. HOWEVER, Steam does require honesty from developers in the marketing of Their games. We have removed Earth: Year 2066 from Early Access on Steam.Customers who purchased the game will be able to get a refund on the store page until Monday May 19th.
This isn’t the first time Valve has faced some controversy over abuses of their Steam platform. You may recall the saga of War Z, which many players were unhappy with when it released on Steam. The game was buggy, didn’t deliver many of the features promised, and shared a title close to Day Z in what seemed like an attempt to confuse and piggyback on sales. When players complained about War Z on Steam forums they found their posts edited and deleted altogether. Steam eventually stepped in, pulling War Z from their service, however the game has since been released as Infestation: Survivor Stories.
The controversy over Earth: Year 2066 has brought up questions as to how easy it is to abuse Steam’s platform, meant to forward indie developer careers and sell games you may not see published otherwise, by people who simply want to abuse the system and turn around a quick buck. It should be noted that both War Z and Earth: Year 2066 actively lied about their titles in the process of representing themselves on the service. For now Steam Greenlight and Steam Early Access are a bit like the wild west, new with unrefined rules, though one can keep their fingers crossed that in the future both consumer and Steam employees alike will be a bit more scrutinizing as to the titles that make it into the public and developers striving for a higher mark of quality.
