Apparently anyone can pass for a legitimate publisher on this marketplace
There’s a new app version of Red Hook Studios’ groundbreaking roguelike Darkest Dungeon. Currently it’s up for grabs on Microsoft’s highly reputable Windows Store at the reasonable price point of only $3.99! Best of all? This little beauty only requires 2MB of free hard drive space to run. Now that’s what I call optimization.
If you were planning to take advantage of the incredible savings the Windows Store is offering today by picking up a few extra copies for the little dungeon crawlers in your life, you’re in luck — the age rating on the app version of Darkest Dungeon is three and up!
The Windows Store’s description of Balaji Chowdary’s app… Wait just a minute, here…
Who the fuck is…
Oh, never mind — I’m sure it’s nothing to be concerned about. Besides, with a professional-sounding publishing name like that, Mr. Chowdary’s company simply has to be legitimate.
Let’s move on and have a look at the app’s description:
“Darkest Dungeon is a Strategy game.Player will employee, train and control a team of heroes in Darkest Dungeon Game. They will journey through warrens, twisted forests, crypts and other strangling places and they will be confronted by monstrous creatures which are unimaginable with these there comes calamities like stress, disease and famine.”
Now, its not completely outside the realm of possibility that Red Hook Studios has turned over the rights to the property to Mr. Chowdary, but… There’s just something slightly off about that description. In fact, there’s something completely and embarrassingly off about every aspect of this ridiculous situation.
Wait, is that yet another dirtbag scammer selling obviously illegal ‘app’ versions of popular videogames? I do believe it is! Welcome aboard, Giri. Apparently Microsoft’s got enough room on the Windows Store for all the scumbags…
Would you like to know another interesting tidbit? Not only did Red Hook’s game (and many, many others) manage to slip through the store’s meticulous vetting process of weeding out titles that obviously, blatantly, and flagrantly violate trademark and copyright law, Microsoft somehow managed to let through a title in Mr. Chowdary’s collection of apps that it own the rights to. You really can’t make this crap up.
I can only hope that Microsoft can get this awful mess cleaned up reasonably soon. It’s looking somewhat doubtful, though. Both Harebrained Schemes and Red Hook Studios have reached out to the company for assistance in pulling down their respective properties from the Windows Store, but at the time of this writing both are still readily available for purchase.
For the record, the only non-malware/scam versions of Darkest Dungeon are available on for purchase on Steam or the Humble Store.
The Darkest Dungeon is being illegally sold on the Windows Game Store [reddit]
Tyler Sigmon [Twitter]
