Photosensitivity warning: This video contains a flash at about 3:30 (due to changing resolution settings) and mild flickering during the gameplay footage at 4:47
Not to be rude or anything, but the video was posted 7 months ago while the warning is posted 3 weeks ago. The warning is kind of useless at this point
Okay, so I forget what the term is, but the thousands of achievements is a clear sign of it. Basically, this game was made so that people can get tons of achievements. I know there was a whole lot out there, but is, in fact, against the Steam TOS. There was a lot of these games taken down, but it appears that a few survived the purge.
@@chocokeeki And a lot of them are shitty puzzle h e n t a i games, which purpose is only to make me suffer to see most of my friend list be taken by cat anime girls or furry creatures in skimpy suits.
I think the purchasable soundtrack is actually just for use in the steam music player. No Idea why there isn't any music in the game though unless they intend for you to open up the music player yourself while playing.
@@Redhotsmasher Because Steam has let you download soundtracks and videos for a while. The early TF2 meet the team videos actually were first released as downloads instead of youtube videos (why the first few on youtube have the same upload date). Now the soundtracks you can buy (or that come with some deluxe editions) are just music files in your steam folders you can easily use with another player or copy paste onto your phone.
There's definitely something dodgy going on here.... the whole thing just made me feel uncomfortable, like I was seeing something that I wasn't meant to.
Could only be certain money laundering tho, you’d need to be able to have the money in a bank already in order to purchase stuff from the store, steam gift cards would work as well actually as a way to convert dirty cash but you’d need access to those then
@@dytr-kHRM.tv-221.25bmit's probably a way of transferring large-ish sums of money between people .......not sure how you would capitalize on it because I don't think you extract any value from the items.
😦 I really want someone to try and do a deep dive into whatever is happening in this game. The achievements I understand, but the weirdly expensive marketplace items confuse me.
When you showed the achievement sales spiking for large amounts of money my first thought was money laundering, but I can't seem to find much information on this game... Could also be some kind of asset flip i guess?
Wouldn't be super shocked if the "backgrounds DLC" was part of the steam marketplace scam. Like, the people with the DLC are the ones who know what's going to get bought somehow. It seems like a buy-in to some sort of secondary off-steam thing.
This is exactly what I was thinking, might be intentionally unappealing, like, an in game background for 25 dollars?? who would pay that? unless it's an entry ticket for something shady
Steam is honestly a pretty common way to "wash" money. There are way more games than just this one doing it. There is also a glut of really terrible extremely basic games, some of them even more basic than this one, with "very positive" reviews, generally around 12-15 of them which all sell for around $60-$80 USD on average. The reviews are all extremely generic, almost certainly made by bots or shills involved in the laundering and these games also produce random achievements and marketplace items similar to this. The way the sticker sales work is they will suddenly buy out a large amount of them at a price well above their value, which artificially inflates their price and then quickly sell them off along with the others they have to make a marginal profit. I've seen at least a hundred of these over the past few years. After a while the account will have accumulated a lot of money in the wallet and then the account itself with the wallet money is sold off on grey market sites for a value less than that which is in the wallet, but more than they actually paid for anything netting a profit. So the scam has two parts, fake company makes bad game to wash money through Steam, make new accounts which buy those games and ALSO inflate the wallet and account standing (via Steam's leveling system) through the shady card/gem price inflation and then sell off those accounts.
I learned to stay away from any Steam game that mentions the achievements as a feature of the game. That means the game has nothing better than a list of achievements to offer.
I know exactly what's going on with the stickers. In fact I was going to comment as soon as you mentioned the 5k achievements. The devs of this game have a discord server where they coordinate a mass buyout of a lot of stickers for very cheap to artificially raise the price and then sell them. This is called a "pump n' dump" and it's very common in crypto and stock markets.
@Graeldon and the funny thing is that this is against Steam TOS, but since they make take a cut of every sale, they just don't enforce it and let people get scamed until enough people complain
Another hidden gem of a channel that the algorithm sent me too. This seems like a perilous quest, trying to beat all Steam games alphabetically, I will watch with great interest.
Good point! Devs made a rookie error! That said, I think the purpose of the game isn't even the achievements. it's whatever shady stuff is going on in the marketplace.
I'm not sure. The money from Steam market place can only be used for things on Steam, so while there could be some degree of money laundering, it's pretty limited in scope. I guess you could use it to buy TF2/CSGO items and sell those on other shady sites for real-world money but... I'm sure you could do that without a middle man.
@@amelialonelyfart8848 Well, the point of money laundering is to make it harder to trace things. If you buy and sell items in the middle through multiple fake steam accounts, it's harder to trace it all down.
@@amelialonelyfart8848if you're selling a game on steam you could use the money in the steam wallet to buy the game / in game purchases that are going to your pockets
I see similar things in Dota 2 section of the steam market: random 3 cent trash item that occassionally gets sold for hundreds of dollars. Also that bumps that type of item into the top of the list for the default type of market sort (dont remember the proper name of it but it is pretty much the volume of transactions, how much money total is involved with transactions in a given time frame), which is normally occupied by expansive and desirable arcanas. From what I know, it's transferring money from hacked accounts. Since these items are not treated like, for example, steam trading cards that are all indistinguishable from one another, they are instead treated as "unique" and put into a browsable list. Sure, it's subject to Gaben Tax but it still works to get money from one steam account to another.
When I first saw the number of achievements, I was reminded of another disappointing game called Seen. I played it over 3 years ago and after checking its Steam store page just now, I can see that it's _still_ in early access! I noted in my review of it at the time that I got 62/92 achievements in under 2 hours. Now the store page says it has over 200 achievements, so the developer(s) either didn't care to heed my advice about excessive achievements or didn't bother to read it in the first place. The game somehow has mostly positive reviews, which I once chalked up to people wanting to show support to a beginner indie developer, but I wasn't so sure of that then and I'm even less sure of it after seeing this video. Something feels suspicious about it, but !Anyway! feels like it takes all the things that Seen did to the next level. Regarding the high achievement count of !Anyway!, here are some possibilities I can think of: 1. When I saw that the unlocks started immediately after you started the game, my mind went to some possible form of manipulation involving the achievement statistics. Perhaps they wanted to make it look like people were putting time into the game even though there wasn't much of a game to play? I don't check achievement statistics before wishlisting or buying a game, but perhaps others do. 2. Similar to the previous point, perhaps the goal was to manipulate the perceived difficulty of the game? If not too many players are unlocking the achievements in a game, that can be interpreted as a sign that a game might be too difficult and turn some potential buyers away. 3. Since you mentioned towards the end that the unlocks were overwhelming your PC, perhaps that was the whole point? Interfering with your ability to complete the game while still forcing you to have it running could be an attempt at getting you over 2 hours of playtime, which would effectively prevent you from refunding. Maybe the idea was for the player to just run the game and walk away from their screen to go do something else while waiting for unlocks to finish, by which time they might have forgotten about it and come back too late for a refund to be possible. Even if they do come back exactly when the final achievement unlocks, they'd have maybe an hour left to try playing the game. They'd be met with the base difficulty of the game (getting boxed in as shown around 10:37 might be by design), as well as the additional time sink of trying to configure controls, and even further delayed by trying to figure out how to exit the game because the quick restart doesn't work. 4. Tying into the previous point, delaying players via achievement overload could be an attempt at inflating the playtime of reviewers. Those who don't wait for the unlocks (either because they quit right away or they have stronger PC builds that can handle this mess) would have a lower playtime on record, making their reviews (which are likely to be negative) seem less legitimate. Meanwhile, those who wait are more likely to be the forgiving types that would leave a positive review, which could be perceived as more legitimate due to having more "playtime" on record. 5. Last but not least, it could just be one of the most amazing displays of incompetence mixed with greed that I've ever seen. Any thoughts on this?
I think there's some validity to your theories. Personally, I suspect a few things are going on: 1) I agree on this point with you - Achievement spam designed to push the game over the 2 hour refund time limit, increase the visibility of the game in the store and attract achievement hunters 2) Something that I'm now going to term "Anti-Player" game design - something that is intentionally bad in order to turn away people looking for an actual game to play and to prevent them from finding: 3) A hidden community of Steam marketplace item manipulators that are playing item trading like a stock market
@@Graeldon I wasn't expecting such a quick reply! In any case, I just finished reading some reviews for !Anyway! and Seen. A few of them brought up an interesting point about using the achievements to spell things on their achievement showcases. Both games seem to use characters as the thumbnail images for their achievements, apparently for that very purpose. This made me curious about the origins of this practice, so I went to Google and started typing until, suddenly, "steam games with letter achievements" auto-filled. This leads to a few guides pointing users toward games that have such achievements, as well as a curator named "Letter Text & Symbol Achievement" that seems to maintain an ongoing list of these games. You would think that just one of these games would be enough but I guess the people who buy these games view it as purchasing new fonts for their showcases. I'm going to sift through the reviews for a few of these games and see if any of them are legitimate games. If they turn out to mostly be cash-grabs using achievements as a selling point, then they can potentially be banned. I found a Reddit post discussing an event where hundreds of "achievement" games were banned/removed by Valve. Another idea that I considered is simply driving them out of the market with a free alternative.
just wanted to throw out that steam achievements can be used to customize profiles. you can set up little messages, so people often seek out these games just for the achievements to add some flair to their profile with the different fonts / styles each game has for their achievements. bit of a rabbit hole, but its a pretty decent sized community looking for the achievements and giving good reviews based on that- not the actual game / gameplay.
@@phlox6510 Yes, this is what I discovered in the past few days. I've also found out that this likely wouldn't work for a free game because Steam has some rules regarding achievements and the ability to have the game appear in players' showcases. A game is only allowed to have up to 100 achievements at first, with no (or very limited) profile features. Once a game meets certain sales and activity metrics, Steam lifts these restrictions through an automated process that checks for said metrics several times a day. It would seem that the positive reviews are at least partly intended to help the game meet the necessary criteria for profile features to be enabled (because otherwise there'd be no point in getting the achievements). It's a symbiotic relationship between the "players" who don't care about playing real games and the "developers" who don't care about making real games. That being said, I did stumble upon a few that seemed to be actual games. Also, although I haven't quite put my finger on it yet, there seems to be a pattern between the pricing of these games, the availability of profile features, and a missing variable that may very well be the availability of trading cards. It may not be news to some people, but as someone who has never cared about the social features of Steam, this has been enlightening.
This feels like the irl non ironic equivalent of Pony island, a game that is extremely empty and hard on purpose just because it wants you to give something away for more "content"
Man, this is a blast from the past, several years ago a bunch of these cheap achievement fodder games popped up, if I recall correctly you used to gain exp for your steam account with achievements but Valve caught on and limited that to 100 achievements, you can still go beyond obviously but you won't gain any reward beyond the hundredth, the scunmy DLC and selling value thing is also a product of the time, a real game mill operation as a whole but a mild nuisance at best on a game to game basis.
What this looks like to me is one of those pump and dump marketplace games where the devs inflate the prices of specific items for profit. Also the fact that the marketplace is like 50x more complex than the base game they might have a bunch of cheap to make games with the same ingame store integrated into it and then the game itself is "built around" that store so to speak
its one of those achievment farming games or custom achievment games.. if anyone remembers hentai 3018 it had 3000achievments which you got after 2minutes playing the achievments were mostly names of people the creator had in his/hers friendlist it had flags numbers custom arts and photos al made to fit into achievment showcase on your steam profile.
Just curious, wouldn't setting your reset level button to [D] solve the movement key problem? I mean, you still wouldn't be able to reset levels without forcequitting, but at least it'd be playable
You can't. Or at least I couldn't. Whatever you set them to, when you closed the menu they would set themselves to the same button. I rewatched my recording several times and couldn't tell what I did differently to get the controls to work that one time. I suspect it was pure luck
I really like the idea of this series ,even when I'm sure you're just running in circles ,beacause the speed at wich games release is higher than you can make videos.Althought this proves that persistence can make something great.Keep up the work man.
My best guess with the steam marketplace thing is they get hacked accounts that have steam funds and buy the lootbox items for how much money said account has.
4:00 Maybe that's what it means by "under development"? 7:00 So... Set both to D? 10:00 Wait, did they promise unique levels? I love how the achievements let us date you (like showing how long there was between you investigating the lootboxes and finishing the achievements).
Some of the achievement are a bit out of order as the way I explored the game didn't quite match the way I wanted to present it as a review, but it does give a good idea of the time spent trying to battle with the controls and finish the stupid platforming levels. This was clearly a game that was never meant to be played, it's just a front for generating random Steam items to sell on a marketplace.
1.- No, game's been out since 2018, no real development besides new sticker loot boxes, after watching the video it's evident that it's not meant to be played anyway. 2.- Doesn't work, the game prioritized the level reset button, maybe read other comments? 3.- Yes, at the start of the video the game description says "10 unique levels", while Joy only had 3, so it's an understandable approach to think different characters have different levels.
The game giving u a lot of achievements reminds me of the flash game "Achievement Unlocked", even though u get to unlock them by doing something in that said game, rather than doing nothing that !Anyway! has.
Looks like that music pack is just music that you can play through stream, not an actual DLC for in game use. Similar to how Subnautica and many other games have soundtracks on Steam.
The recent reviews suggest that the game has been repaired. Spoilers: it has not. From the 'reborn' version wanting me to 'sing in' (and not sign, so I guess I better practice my vocals) to the inability to move right once someone checks the movement keys, the game feels in some ways more broken then ever. At least if I close out of the game and return to it, I don't have to wait ages to get achievements. So they fixed the most important part? Maybe? I am so confused by why this game refuses to work. It's almost as if that's the point.
This game does feel like it's either for money laundering, or as an easy way to get letters on people's profiles, as a lot of people seem to do that, but the game doesn't make any sense otherwise.
I mean... I do know a few games where you could buy the soundtrack- but as in, you get the MP3s for you to listen to it outside of the game, not as in "You need to pay extra to hear it in the game in the first place".
the soundtrack "dlc" is actually a normal soundtrack app you can find for practically any game, it is not a dlc for the game, its a separate app listed as a dlc but it doesnt require the base game and it simply lets you download the music files and play them in either the steam player through steam directly or in any external player if you just go to the soundtrack folder
Hello, I’m a first time viewer. I think I may be going crazy but this game reminded me a lot of IMSCARED. That game was actually a game, but the main thing it was doing was trying to come off as a computer virus. The game was absolutely terrifying. Anyway makes me feel that because of specific reasons: retro graphics, messes up your computer, creepy atmosphere, and something shady going on. It ALSO reminded me of Welcome to the Game, which I will not speak much about because I do not feel comfortable with it. I’ll just say it’s a game about the dark web. This gives way to the perfect idea to make a game *about* this game. A horror game that takes the image of a retro game but in actuality is a black market and you gotta exit the game to take precautions against people trying to get you. I think that would really get this creepy game well known and also be an incredible experience (if developed well of course).
how soft your voice was when it cut to you talking while playing was like endearing in a way. idk lol🤷♂️ good video tho the algorithm decided to reccomend me you and youre pretty damn competent so i subbed too. also the problem with price spikes in the market place isnt just with emotes and whatever, ive seen the spikes while selling trading cards and tf2 backpack items. it seems like less popular items have this problem, seems sketchy but it could just be trades too where they have to trade steam wallet money and theres no direct way to do that. but thats just one possibility and I feel like it probably is more shady than I had thought.
Hm.. I'm reminded of a piece of hacker fiction I read where stolen currency was used to purchase a ludicrously expensive subscription to an online magazine in an attempt to launder the money.
Those games were created only for people who make aesthetic profile, so they can put them on steam showcase it's the only purpose of the game and there is a lot like this
I myself am a steam achievement hunter. I like seeing the big 100% symbol by the achievement bar. And I can say, with absolute certainty, I would be ashamed of myself if I ever got this game or anything else like it. There are easy platinum out there, but one as easy as keeping the game open for an hour and a half? That is a hall of shame worthy platinum. That game by itself, has almost as many as I have on my entire account, which as of today has almost 150 games. And that's ignoring the implications of that utterly ridiculous marketplace and item generator.
The price for items changing could be some guy selling at an high price an item to transfert some money from an account to another. The reason could be that some country like Argentina have game at a very low price and if you trick the game that you are in this country you can pay big game for like 3 bucks BUT you can't use another region credit card so using another account and buying an item can be a way to transfert easily money without giving much to Steam.
I don't know if anyone have pointed it out, but I'll say it anyways, I think I know the reason why the items sell in bulk for a lot. TL;DR: They are being used as a way to transfer money from one account to another, usually a stolen account that usually have CS:GO or DOTA skins. As a part of the CS:GO community, a big part of the Game is the Skins market, some even go for thousands and thousands of dollars. And as many know, the steam market have the ability to buy and sell items from your steam inventory. As you probably guessed, yes people would find games that have marketable items with such low prices and low quantities that they can pinpoint who the seller is, usually themselves so they can transfer the money from one account to another, and even buy every or at least most of the items for sale for extremely cheap even if they're rare. This game apparently simply has the characteristics to be used this way, rather than being created for this sole purpose. As the most probable use of this game is for writing something on the Achievements shelf. Quick FAQ: Why don't they just transfer said items from one account to the other? For a few reasons, first you have the trade ban of 7 days meaning some items simply might not be tradable on the time the account compromise happened. Secondly, the trade itself can be a bit of a hassle as you might have to access the Steam Guard to confirm the trade, since every trade you give any item should be getting 2 factor autentication, but not every purchase from the community market. And lastly and more probable, using the market is a way to quickly send money to multiple accounts with minimal to no traceble signs to any account as you can have the first account the funds went, but, with no trade ban for steam funds, it is impossible to determine where or even if the funds were traded to a second or even third account. If people are being scammed out of thousands of dollars, why do basically noone outside the community is talking about it? Well, that's a complicated topic. This kind of scam is really common on the CS:GO community, even though it is a small part of the community that actually have these skins as they're kind of expensive. If you have a knife/glove that cost anywhere from $80 to $100,000 you'll know about bots commenting on your profile about adding/playing together etc every few days at least. The biggest problem is that this scam basically doesn't want to scam one big price item, but rather scam smaller priced items dozens if not thousands times. They rather scam 1000 $80 items than 1 $80,000 item, because there's the odd possibility of someone going "meh, $80, who cares?" and less people caring about other people getting scammed out of $80. The underreporting ocuring about this topic is probably a mix of a lot of things among this point, but if I would guess I would say that it's because such a small percentage of people getting scammed and those that are being scammed aren't getting scammed for a big chunk of money. So you're saying only people with small inventories get scammed for not having secured enough accounts? Nope, decently sized streamers have been victims of scams in the community. Recently a brazilian ex-pro player and streamer "Nahzinha" got scammed out of around $30,000, her account compromise? We don't know, the only thing we know for a fact was that the 2-factor authentication did not work properly and she even had herself locked out of the account for over 3 weeks. There are a few other examples with bigger numbers but not exactly account compromising, but I think you can get the point. How do you know about this? Well, I'm not really a skins collector for myself, as I only have around 150-200 dollars worth of an inventory, but I like to follow the skins scene of CS:GO and I used to be a decently sized trader of the Brazilian Rocket League trading scene on the Xbox back in 2017 so I know a few things about how people can try to do certain things related to skins. Never done anything myself, but had to protect myself against a lot of things that I didn't even imagined were possible on the Xbox Platform, lol.
I have this game on my account, got it from some "free steam keys" website ages ago. It seems like the actual scheme here is not money laundering or something shady like that, but something like selling alot of steam keys to services that "sell steam key loot boxes" or make giveaways, and making profit out of that. Sme people will play the game and use marketplace, then developer can sell steam items or something. There are actually alot of different abusive scheme games on steam, some have 9999 achievements (zup zup is the only I remember, there are 9 parts as I remember), every achievement is given every second played on timer and they contain all the ascii symbols, so that people will buy one cent game to get a way for making words from achievement stand in profile or just getting steam exp AND get steam cards to sell on marketplace. Another game provides servise to host pirate games from steam account. People do all sorts of crazy stuff with services that steam provides.
reminds me of the fact that i have din's legacy on gog, and later on steam, so when i loaded my save from the gog version in the steam version i immediately got a lot of the achievements. the reason i bought the steam version is because it's more up to date and it somehow runs better.
Ah yes, the "as many achievements as possible" games, yeah, I remember some of them. Sadly, I even own two of them, which both are just shitty puzzles with clicking on objects. Both games are actually parts of their own series, that being "Oik" and "Zup!", which contain more and more achievements in every following game. Fortunately, these ones aren't actually asking for lots of money (unless we're talking about endless """sequels""") for them to be playable, they're both working well enough and can be completed in minutes.
By the way, I decided to check how the Zup series is doing, and *HOLY SCHEIßE* it's still going and the most recent game "Zup! Q" came out in March of this year. Heck... Although still not as bad as Anyway, it's main profit is just reselling pretty much the same games for quite low and available price.
Yep, achievement hunter games are abundant on Steam. But at least most of them are reasonably priced, and you know what you're getting. Anyway is definitely not.
1:49 funny enough, Payday 2 does actually have 5k achievements TF2 also has the soundtrack as a DLC but it's to listen while using Steam, i mean you can even buy movies or watch tv shows in Steam (for example the Postal movie and Payday The Web Series, but there's probably more)
This smells to me like a cryptominer, if you're not using it as a money laundering scheme, honestly. Game wants you to leave it open for 30 minutes at a time, and after 2 1/2 hours, you can exchange for one item.
1.The achievement use for letters so you can arrange it for like welcome to my profile or stuff,i see this happened a lot in many many video games to just give player some customization so thier game actually worth something for buying 2.the market some time when the game isnt popular so the items didnt really have many in the market some people just put that item for like million dollars,shady? I literally can put a csgo case and sell it for million dollar,no one gonna buy it but you can do that
you know i used to think that triple a studios were the peak of greed and scummy practices in the video game industry but my god charging the player for what is probably ONE music track is absolutely ridiculous. i could literally just pull up youtube and be done with it, although considering the achievement spam i think my browser would probably crash or something.
I bought some games to get their achievements. Not because the achievements themselves, but the challenges or the explorations I had to make just get them
the sad part about this game is that i actually really like the artstyle, if only some better gameplay and like, an actual tutorial were added (ignoring it being a broken buggy mess shilling achievements and probably also a pumpndump)
the soundtrack isn't dlc for the game, steam has a music player and you can buy game soundtracks to listen to although it's still weird how there's no actual in-game music yet there's a soundtrack
12:12 The shadyness is true. While I wont accuse this game of it, one thing steam shovelwear games did was work the Steam Market for profit. The most common way was to farm steam trading cards to convert gems, which then could be made into other cards that had value or sold whole sale. While the emojis and steam chat items are not the same degree, its likely the same operation to farm currency and the use of a low volume, low cost item is the easiest way to move money between steam accounts.
I like how Bendy is invisible because she's black just like the background. I find it odd though that you'd assume that choosing a different character would give you different levels...
@@Graeldon I was thinking it'd be more like classic sonic games where each character can go somewhere different in the same one. Up until you selected Sylvia and got a different level
These items from cheap games are being used by players from Brazil, Russia and other in development countries to transfer funds to Argentinian and Turkish Steam accounts to buy games for cheap at discounted prices. If you sell an item that's often sold (like csgo, tf2 and dota items) for an unusual price, an alert is sent to Steam Support to review the transaction and they lock the account (because it might've been hacked, as someone tried to transfer funds) or change the account country back to the original one if something suspicious is found.
@Graeldon A while ago they were using MercadoPago and PicPay to trick Steam into thinking an argentinian card was being used and create argentinian Steam accounts. But it was fixed.
This video was really good, if i may suggest some obscure steam games nobody else has reviewed, I’d suggest “Piggy Poggy Pog” or the infamous “Gravity Bone”. 🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦
Thanks for the suggestions, they both look interesting! Unfortunately, I'm not taking recommendations for this series... yet. If I'm able to do this full time and produce 2 videos per week, I'm planning on adding a membership tier that allows for suggesting games to be featured on the channel
@@Graeldon all cool, I would love to support you but well, you know how Canada’s economy is currently (at least here in NL). Just found your channel but I really enjoy the tone of them, getting tired of youtubers screaming and being overdramatic. Have a good morning/afternoon depending on what part of the country you're in 💙💙🇨🇦🇨🇦
I'm glad you're enjoying the content! Funnily enough, I think I've only ever watched 1 or 2 AVGN videos in my time, so that's quite the coincidence! I don't go for the high energy shouty-style of reviews that many youtubers have been popularizing, that's just not me.
My first thought was that this game is part of some kind of creepypasta ARG, or perhaps some indie developer's weird artsy protest of microtransactions and lootboxes. Possibly both, who knows?
I’ve got a lvl 3 steam achievement case that spells out, “This Game Fucking Sucks.” Most people just use it to spell their username. Most people are familiar with “Oik 1-5” a lot of games like that. Most of these games don’t count as games in achievement competitions so most won’t bloat your achievement count in completed games.
I wonder if the sheer volume of achievements causing the steam client to crash is intentional. Trying to keep you there long enough that you exceed the time allowed for a refund
Something I noticed. According to the steam page, the game is only available in English and Russian. A bunch of the achievements specifically use Russian letters as well. Basically, this game is a Russian scam.
This game exists solely for people who want to have letters in their achievements. Why? Because you can show off those achievements on your Steam profile in any order you like, and that way you can write something with them.
12:50 - Actually you are kind of incorrect by that. Square Enix sold the soundtrack to DQ11 as a DLC and the soundtrack in the game was a midi version of the orchestrated one.
this game kinda feels like the kind of game Steam Farmers would buy? those who are deep into achievement hunts, owning as much games as possible, and weird Steam economy stuff
I'm sure someone else has already left a similar comment, but to me it seems like a standard Steam market pump and dump. Buy low (or get low in this case, since the game gives keys to open loot boxes), convince others of the item's value making them buy (raising the price), sell high, get out. The only question is, who is buying these items for these high prices. Most users probably aren't stupid enough to buy worthless junk in a random game for really high prices. If I had to guess, over the years I've heard about people using bots to automatically buy and sell items in order to make a profit. The only time I ever recall seeing one in action was in a video where some TH-camr (don't remember who, sorry) performed a similar trick on some emoticon. I'm not 100% sure who is performing the scam, but in the video you show 10000 avatar crates being sold at once. That amount makes me assume that the developers may be the ones performing the scam. The letter/symbol achievements are just a way to get sales, you can put showcases on your Steam profile. One of those is an achievement showcase, and many people buy games like this in order to spell things out on their profile. Very interesting video, keep up the great work.
Photosensitivity warning: This video contains a flash at about 3:30 (due to changing resolution settings) and mild flickering during the gameplay footage at 4:47
I accidentally read "photosynthesis warning"😂
@@nobrainfound 😆😆
Too late, now I'm dead
@@mr_flava RIP
Not to be rude or anything, but the video was posted 7 months ago while the warning is posted 3 weeks ago. The warning is kind of useless at this point
I love how this entire review is just unraveling denial about just how bad this game could be.
A gradual descent into madness...
🎵How ba-a-a-ad can I be?🎵
Okay, so I forget what the term is, but the thousands of achievements is a clear sign of it. Basically, this game was made so that people can get tons of achievements. I know there was a whole lot out there, but is, in fact, against the Steam TOS. There was a lot of these games taken down, but it appears that a few survived the purge.
Why would people want tons?
So they can spell out stuff in Achievements Section in order to customise profiles even more. I know friends who done it including my self.
There's also a lot of crappy games that practically exist just to sell animated avatars, avatar frames, profile themes, backgrounds, etc.
@@chocokeeki And a lot of them are shitty puzzle h e n t a i games, which purpose is only to make me suffer to see most of my friend list be taken by cat anime girls or furry creatures in skimpy suits.
@@bipolarmadness5075 It's really gross tbh. Porn addicts need to be kicked offline.
I think the purchasable soundtrack is actually just for use in the steam music player.
No Idea why there isn't any music in the game though unless they intend for you to open up the music player yourself while playing.
That's possible, but an incredibly odd design choice if so
@@Graeldonusually steam music player soundtracks have a music sash instead of the dlc sash
...Steam has a music player? Why?
@@Redhotsmasher Because Steam has let you download soundtracks and videos for a while. The early TF2 meet the team videos actually were first released as downloads instead of youtube videos (why the first few on youtube have the same upload date).
Now the soundtracks you can buy (or that come with some deluxe editions) are just music files in your steam folders you can easily use with another player or copy paste onto your phone.
Considering the controls situation the in game music prolly just doesn't work...
This feels like money laundering or something of the sort with all this paid stuff
There's definitely something dodgy going on here.... the whole thing just made me feel uncomfortable, like I was seeing something that I wasn't meant to.
I thought you were accusing him of laundering money lmao
Could only be certain money laundering tho, you’d need to be able to have the money in a bank already in order to purchase stuff from the store, steam gift cards would work as well actually as a way to convert dirty cash but you’d need access to those then
Wonder if the achievements are also somehow monetizable
@@dytr-kHRM.tv-221.25bmit's probably a way of transferring large-ish sums of money between people .......not sure how you would capitalize on it because I don't think you extract any value from the items.
Me: hmm wow this looks like a unfinished mess.
Me, near the end: what kind of high level complex money game are they running wtf.
Nothing puts the fear of Gabe in me more than a list of DLC that you can scroll through.
train simulator
hoi4
sims
payday 2
any paradox interactive game
Don’t look at DCS world, over $3,000 of DLC.
If you suddenly disappeared we'll know it's because you stumble on a Anyway's shaddy black market!
😦
I really want someone to try and do a deep dive into whatever is happening in this game. The achievements I understand, but the weirdly expensive marketplace items confuse me.
When you showed the achievement sales spiking for large amounts of money my first thought was money laundering, but I can't seem to find much information on this game...
Could also be some kind of asset flip i guess?
Wouldn't be super shocked if the "backgrounds DLC" was part of the steam marketplace scam. Like, the people with the DLC are the ones who know what's going to get bought somehow. It seems like a buy-in to some sort of secondary off-steam thing.
This is exactly what I was thinking, might be intentionally unappealing, like, an in game background for 25 dollars?? who would pay that? unless it's an entry ticket for something shady
the backround dlc was uploaded on april fools day so I'm assuming its just a joke
@@splat3r_ A $25 joke?
@@splat3r_that's prob what they want us to think
@@Emmariscobarbetter than the 80 dollar jokes companies sell now 🤭
Steam is honestly a pretty common way to "wash" money. There are way more games than just this one doing it. There is also a glut of really terrible extremely basic games, some of them even more basic than this one, with "very positive" reviews, generally around 12-15 of them which all sell for around $60-$80 USD on average. The reviews are all extremely generic, almost certainly made by bots or shills involved in the laundering and these games also produce random achievements and marketplace items similar to this. The way the sticker sales work is they will suddenly buy out a large amount of them at a price well above their value, which artificially inflates their price and then quickly sell them off along with the others they have to make a marginal profit. I've seen at least a hundred of these over the past few years. After a while the account will have accumulated a lot of money in the wallet and then the account itself with the wallet money is sold off on grey market sites for a value less than that which is in the wallet, but more than they actually paid for anything netting a profit. So the scam has two parts, fake company makes bad game to wash money through Steam, make new accounts which buy those games and ALSO inflate the wallet and account standing (via Steam's leveling system) through the shady card/gem price inflation and then sell off those accounts.
I learned to stay away from any Steam game that mentions the achievements as a feature of the game.
That means the game has nothing better than a list of achievements to offer.
I know exactly what's going on with the stickers. In fact I was going to comment as soon as you mentioned the 5k achievements.
The devs of this game have a discord server where they coordinate a mass buyout of a lot of stickers for very cheap to artificially raise the price and then sell them. This is called a "pump n' dump" and it's very common in crypto and stock markets.
That's actually a very likely explanation.
Is this really the world we live in? How bizarre.
@Graeldon and the funny thing is that this is against Steam TOS, but since they make take a cut of every sale, they just don't enforce it and let people get scamed until enough people complain
@@Graeldon Thank god there are a lot more things worse than scamming people
How do you know about the discord server?
@@GraeldonI do love me a good whistleblower. Looks like this comment has riled up a couple self-reporters. 😏
Another hidden gem of a channel that the algorithm sent me too.
This seems like a perilous quest, trying to beat all Steam games alphabetically, I will watch with great interest.
Welcome! I'm glad you stumbled across my channel, and that you're enjoying the content! It's an impossible quest, but the journey should be fun!
Shoulda made it one every 2 seconds so that you couldnt refund smh.
Good point! Devs made a rookie error!
That said, I think the purpose of the game isn't even the achievements. it's whatever shady stuff is going on in the marketplace.
@@GraeldonMaybe it was intentional.
I honestly hope info on this reaches steam so they can get this market-manipulation garbage taken down.
I want my 5000 achievements!
Nice homestuck pfp
cope
@@carlbrenston8436 Name followed by 4 numbers is typically a sockpuppet.
@@recursiveslacker7730everyone in this commonet thread has 4 numbers, is it really that common? Jeez
The items bought in bulk for crazy high prices could be a way for criminals to pay each other for services
The Russian mafia was involved in TF2 trading for a while. Makes me wonder if this is something similar.
I'm not sure. The money from Steam market place can only be used for things on Steam, so while there could be some degree of money laundering, it's pretty limited in scope. I guess you could use it to buy TF2/CSGO items and sell those on other shady sites for real-world money but... I'm sure you could do that without a middle man.
@@amelialonelyfart8848 Well, the point of money laundering is to make it harder to trace things. If you buy and sell items in the middle through multiple fake steam accounts, it's harder to trace it all down.
Your comment got liked 69 times.
@@amelialonelyfart8848if you're selling a game on steam you could use the money in the steam wallet to buy the game / in game purchases that are going to your pockets
FYI: The purpose of this game is money laundering. That's what those sudden high-priced sales were.
I still find it wild that this if of thing exists in Steam
I see similar things in Dota 2 section of the steam market: random 3 cent trash item that occassionally gets sold for hundreds of dollars. Also that bumps that type of item into the top of the list for the default type of market sort (dont remember the proper name of it but it is pretty much the volume of transactions, how much money total is involved with transactions in a given time frame), which is normally occupied by expansive and desirable arcanas.
From what I know, it's transferring money from hacked accounts. Since these items are not treated like, for example, steam trading cards that are all indistinguishable from one another, they are instead treated as "unique" and put into a browsable list. Sure, it's subject to Gaben Tax but it still works to get money from one steam account to another.
When I first saw the number of achievements, I was reminded of another disappointing game called Seen. I played it over 3 years ago and after checking its Steam store page just now, I can see that it's _still_ in early access! I noted in my review of it at the time that I got 62/92 achievements in under 2 hours. Now the store page says it has over 200 achievements, so the developer(s) either didn't care to heed my advice about excessive achievements or didn't bother to read it in the first place. The game somehow has mostly positive reviews, which I once chalked up to people wanting to show support to a beginner indie developer, but I wasn't so sure of that then and I'm even less sure of it after seeing this video. Something feels suspicious about it, but !Anyway! feels like it takes all the things that Seen did to the next level.
Regarding the high achievement count of !Anyway!, here are some possibilities I can think of:
1. When I saw that the unlocks started immediately after you started the game, my mind went to some possible form of manipulation involving the achievement statistics. Perhaps they wanted to make it look like people were putting time into the game even though there wasn't much of a game to play? I don't check achievement statistics before wishlisting or buying a game, but perhaps others do.
2. Similar to the previous point, perhaps the goal was to manipulate the perceived difficulty of the game? If not too many players are unlocking the achievements in a game, that can be interpreted as a sign that a game might be too difficult and turn some potential buyers away.
3. Since you mentioned towards the end that the unlocks were overwhelming your PC, perhaps that was the whole point? Interfering with your ability to complete the game while still forcing you to have it running could be an attempt at getting you over 2 hours of playtime, which would effectively prevent you from refunding. Maybe the idea was for the player to just run the game and walk away from their screen to go do something else while waiting for unlocks to finish, by which time they might have forgotten about it and come back too late for a refund to be possible. Even if they do come back exactly when the final achievement unlocks, they'd have maybe an hour left to try playing the game. They'd be met with the base difficulty of the game (getting boxed in as shown around 10:37 might be by design), as well as the additional time sink of trying to configure controls, and even further delayed by trying to figure out how to exit the game because the quick restart doesn't work.
4. Tying into the previous point, delaying players via achievement overload could be an attempt at inflating the playtime of reviewers. Those who don't wait for the unlocks (either because they quit right away or they have stronger PC builds that can handle this mess) would have a lower playtime on record, making their reviews (which are likely to be negative) seem less legitimate. Meanwhile, those who wait are more likely to be the forgiving types that would leave a positive review, which could be perceived as more legitimate due to having more "playtime" on record.
5. Last but not least, it could just be one of the most amazing displays of incompetence mixed with greed that I've ever seen.
Any thoughts on this?
I think there's some validity to your theories. Personally, I suspect a few things are going on:
1) I agree on this point with you - Achievement spam designed to push the game over the 2 hour refund time limit, increase the visibility of the game in the store and attract achievement hunters
2) Something that I'm now going to term "Anti-Player" game design - something that is intentionally bad in order to turn away people looking for an actual game to play and to prevent them from finding:
3) A hidden community of Steam marketplace item manipulators that are playing item trading like a stock market
@@Graeldon
I wasn't expecting such a quick reply! In any case, I just finished reading some reviews for !Anyway! and Seen. A few of them brought up an interesting point about using the achievements to spell things on their achievement showcases. Both games seem to use characters as the thumbnail images for their achievements, apparently for that very purpose.
This made me curious about the origins of this practice, so I went to Google and started typing until, suddenly, "steam games with letter achievements" auto-filled. This leads to a few guides pointing users toward games that have such achievements, as well as a curator named "Letter Text & Symbol Achievement" that seems to maintain an ongoing list of these games. You would think that just one of these games would be enough but I guess the people who buy these games view it as purchasing new fonts for their showcases.
I'm going to sift through the reviews for a few of these games and see if any of them are legitimate games. If they turn out to mostly be cash-grabs using achievements as a selling point, then they can potentially be banned. I found a Reddit post discussing an event where hundreds of "achievement" games were banned/removed by Valve. Another idea that I considered is simply driving them out of the market with a free alternative.
just wanted to throw out that steam achievements can be used to customize profiles. you can set up little messages, so people often seek out these games just for the achievements to add some flair to their profile with the different fonts / styles each game has for their achievements. bit of a rabbit hole, but its a pretty decent sized community looking for the achievements and giving good reviews based on that- not the actual game / gameplay.
@@phlox6510
Yes, this is what I discovered in the past few days. I've also found out that this likely wouldn't work for a free game because Steam has some rules regarding achievements and the ability to have the game appear in players' showcases. A game is only allowed to have up to 100 achievements at first, with no (or very limited) profile features. Once a game meets certain sales and activity metrics, Steam lifts these restrictions through an automated process that checks for said metrics several times a day.
It would seem that the positive reviews are at least partly intended to help the game meet the necessary criteria for profile features to be enabled (because otherwise there'd be no point in getting the achievements). It's a symbiotic relationship between the "players" who don't care about playing real games and the "developers" who don't care about making real games. That being said, I did stumble upon a few that seemed to be actual games. Also, although I haven't quite put my finger on it yet, there seems to be a pattern between the pricing of these games, the availability of profile features, and a missing variable that may very well be the availability of trading cards. It may not be news to some people, but as someone who has never cared about the social features of Steam, this has been enlightening.
This feels like the irl non ironic equivalent of Pony island, a game that is extremely empty and hard on purpose just because it wants you to give something away for more "content"
Damn, 5000 achievements in 84 minutes? You must be a amazing gamer :P
The weird spikes in price for random items reek of Pump&Dump. Truly a trustworthy studio we got there...
Man, this is a blast from the past, several years ago a bunch of these cheap achievement fodder games popped up, if I recall correctly you used to gain exp for your steam account with achievements but Valve caught on and limited that to 100 achievements, you can still go beyond obviously but you won't gain any reward beyond the hundredth, the scunmy DLC and selling value thing is also a product of the time, a real game mill operation as a whole but a mild nuisance at best on a game to game basis.
I won't be surprised of this thing was also a cryptominer trying to disguise it's activity by throwing you constant achivements or something
What this looks like to me is one of those pump and dump marketplace games where the devs inflate the prices of specific items for profit. Also the fact that the marketplace is like 50x more complex than the base game they might have a bunch of cheap to make games with the same ingame store integrated into it and then the game itself is "built around" that store so to speak
Yooo, your editing skills are top notch! Great job dude!
Thanks! I'm still learning though, got a long way to go before I'd call myself decent.
I feel like I'm improving with every video though!
That’s great to hear!
@@coherenteg5376 As long as people enjoy what I make, then I'm happy!
Thanks for stopping by and taking the time to comment, I appreciate it!
6:52 OMG they coded BOTH "right" and "reset" keybinds as "r" internally. So whatever you assign to one ends with the others.
Is it just me, or do I think of this game as like some creepypasta game, even though it isn't?
Same
its one of those achievment farming games or custom achievment games.. if anyone remembers hentai 3018 it had 3000achievments which you got after 2minutes playing the achievments were mostly names of people the creator had in his/hers friendlist it had flags numbers custom arts and photos al made to fit into achievment showcase on your steam profile.
Just curious, wouldn't setting your reset level button to [D] solve the movement key problem? I mean, you still wouldn't be able to reset levels without forcequitting, but at least it'd be playable
I did try that, but the game would prioritize the reset function before the right movement. So you're unable to move to the right 🫤
@@Graeldon wow, what a great design, nice
@@Graeldon What if you swich them?
You can't. Or at least I couldn't. Whatever you set them to, when you closed the menu they would set themselves to the same button.
I rewatched my recording several times and couldn't tell what I did differently to get the controls to work that one time. I suspect it was pure luck
Was there a text config file somewhere?
I really like the idea of this series ,even when I'm sure you're just running in circles ,beacause the speed at wich games release is higher than you can make videos.Althought this proves that persistence can make something great.Keep up the work man.
My best guess with the steam marketplace thing is they get hacked accounts that have steam funds and buy the lootbox items for how much money said account has.
Or money laundering.
4:00 Maybe that's what it means by "under development"?
7:00 So... Set both to D?
10:00 Wait, did they promise unique levels?
I love how the achievements let us date you (like showing how long there was between you investigating the lootboxes and finishing the achievements).
Some of the achievement are a bit out of order as the way I explored the game didn't quite match the way I wanted to present it as a review, but it does give a good idea of the time spent trying to battle with the controls and finish the stupid platforming levels.
This was clearly a game that was never meant to be played, it's just a front for generating random Steam items to sell on a marketplace.
1.- No, game's been out since 2018, no real development besides new sticker loot boxes, after watching the video it's evident that it's not meant to be played anyway.
2.- Doesn't work, the game prioritized the level reset button, maybe read other comments?
3.- Yes, at the start of the video the game description says "10 unique levels", while Joy only had 3, so it's an understandable approach to think different characters have different levels.
I randomly came across this video and while Im not gonna do it, i feel the investigation of this rabbit hole could lead to some interesting finds XD
The game giving u a lot of achievements reminds me of the flash game "Achievement Unlocked", even though u get to unlock them by doing something in that said game, rather than doing nothing that !Anyway! has.
achievement unlocked was atleast funny
@@neevko267 yeah
Looks like that music pack is just music that you can play through stream, not an actual DLC for in game use. Similar to how Subnautica and many other games have soundtracks on Steam.
This game just feels like a scam.
100% agree. Exploring the marketplace of items have me done really weird vibes
The recent reviews suggest that the game has been repaired.
Spoilers: it has not.
From the 'reborn' version wanting me to 'sing in' (and not sign, so I guess I better practice my vocals) to the inability to move right once someone checks the movement keys, the game feels in some ways more broken then ever.
At least if I close out of the game and return to it, I don't have to wait ages to get achievements. So they fixed the most important part? Maybe?
I am so confused by why this game refuses to work. It's almost as if that's the point.
doing gods' work...
This game does feel like it's either for money laundering, or as an easy way to get letters on people's profiles, as a lot of people seem to do that, but the game doesn't make any sense otherwise.
Just found out about this TH-cam channel and I just wanna tell you to keep up the good work because you make great videos!
Thanks for the kind words! I feel like I'm still improving, the quality isn't quite where I want it yet, but it's getting there!
I mean... I do know a few games where you could buy the soundtrack- but as in, you get the MP3s for you to listen to it outside of the game, not as in "You need to pay extra to hear it in the game in the first place".
Omg I love you! This is a great idea for a channel. Can’t wait to follow your journey! Great job 🥰
Thank you! ❤️❤️
This channel is just Josh Strife Hayes but for crappy steam games and I am all for it
His style was definitely a big influence, as are The Completionist and The Cynical Brit. Plus a bit of IronPineapple haha
the soundtrack "dlc" is actually a normal soundtrack app you can find for practically any game, it is not a dlc for the game, its a separate app listed as a dlc but it doesnt require the base game and it simply lets you download the music files and play them in either the steam player through steam directly or in any external player if you just go to the soundtrack folder
Hello, I’m a first time viewer.
I think I may be going crazy but this game reminded me a lot of IMSCARED. That game was actually a game, but the main thing it was doing was trying to come off as a computer virus. The game was absolutely terrifying.
Anyway makes me feel that because of specific reasons: retro graphics, messes up your computer, creepy atmosphere, and something shady going on.
It ALSO reminded me of Welcome to the Game, which I will not speak much about because I do not feel comfortable with it. I’ll just say it’s a game about the dark web.
This gives way to the perfect idea to make a game *about* this game. A horror game that takes the image of a retro game but in actuality is a black market and you gotta exit the game to take precautions against people trying to get you.
I think that would really get this creepy game well known and also be an incredible experience (if developed well of course).
That's a pretty cool idea!
And welcome to the channel =)
Anyway is an example of a bunch of Steam's shadier issues; effectively just being a front for money laundering via the Steam marketplace.
how soft your voice was when it cut to you talking while playing was like endearing in a way. idk lol🤷♂️ good video tho the algorithm decided to reccomend me you and youre pretty damn competent so i subbed too. also the problem with price spikes in the market place isnt just with emotes and whatever, ive seen the spikes while selling trading cards and tf2 backpack items. it seems like less popular items have this problem, seems sketchy but it could just be trades too where they have to trade steam wallet money and theres no direct way to do that. but thats just one possibility and I feel like it probably is more shady than I had thought.
I think the market sketchiness extends far beyond !Anyway!, but this game really opened my eyes to it.
And welcome to the channel =)
Hm.. I'm reminded of a piece of hacker fiction I read where stolen currency was used to purchase a ludicrously expensive subscription to an online magazine in an attempt to launder the money.
This is the first video I got recommended from your channel and I thought "Anyway" is the name of this video format you are doing lol
Those games were created only for people who make aesthetic profile, so they can put them on steam showcase it's the only purpose of the game and there is a lot like this
1:25 can we talk about the 200MB RECOMMENDED RAM!?
As a fan of retro gaming, this feels like something you’d see on the internet archive as a broken emulation of an arcade game made in 1988.
This is the first Commodore 64 game I've seen on Steam.
Granted, the C64 did this with 64k of ram and file sizes a fraction of a tiny jpeg.
Looks more like Atari to me
I am happy that this video found its way to my rec page, I hope youll get more subscribers, very underrated for what you do!
Thank you for the support! I don't mind how big or small the channel is, as long as people enjoy the content =)
@@Graeldon fair :)
I myself am a steam achievement hunter. I like seeing the big 100% symbol by the achievement bar. And I can say, with absolute certainty, I would be ashamed of myself if I ever got this game or anything else like it. There are easy platinum out there, but one as easy as keeping the game open for an hour and a half? That is a hall of shame worthy platinum. That game by itself, has almost as many as I have on my entire account, which as of today has almost 150 games. And that's ignoring the implications of that utterly ridiculous marketplace and item generator.
The price for items changing could be some guy selling at an high price an item to transfert some money from an account to another. The reason could be that some country like Argentina have game at a very low price and if you trick the game that you are in this country you can pay big game for like 3 bucks BUT you can't use another region credit card so using another account and buying an item can be a way to transfert easily money without giving much to Steam.
I don't know if anyone have pointed it out, but I'll say it anyways, I think I know the reason why the items sell in bulk for a lot. TL;DR: They are being used as a way to transfer money from one account to another, usually a stolen account that usually have CS:GO or DOTA skins.
As a part of the CS:GO community, a big part of the Game is the Skins market, some even go for thousands and thousands of dollars. And as many know, the steam market have the ability to buy and sell items from your steam inventory. As you probably guessed, yes people would find games that have marketable items with such low prices and low quantities that they can pinpoint who the seller is, usually themselves so they can transfer the money from one account to another, and even buy every or at least most of the items for sale for extremely cheap even if they're rare. This game apparently simply has the characteristics to be used this way, rather than being created for this sole purpose. As the most probable use of this game is for writing something on the Achievements shelf.
Quick FAQ:
Why don't they just transfer said items from one account to the other? For a few reasons, first you have the trade ban of 7 days meaning some items simply might not be tradable on the time the account compromise happened. Secondly, the trade itself can be a bit of a hassle as you might have to access the Steam Guard to confirm the trade, since every trade you give any item should be getting 2 factor autentication, but not every purchase from the community market. And lastly and more probable, using the market is a way to quickly send money to multiple accounts with minimal to no traceble signs to any account as you can have the first account the funds went, but, with no trade ban for steam funds, it is impossible to determine where or even if the funds were traded to a second or even third account.
If people are being scammed out of thousands of dollars, why do basically noone outside the community is talking about it? Well, that's a complicated topic. This kind of scam is really common on the CS:GO community, even though it is a small part of the community that actually have these skins as they're kind of expensive. If you have a knife/glove that cost anywhere from $80 to $100,000 you'll know about bots commenting on your profile about adding/playing together etc every few days at least. The biggest problem is that this scam basically doesn't want to scam one big price item, but rather scam smaller priced items dozens if not thousands times. They rather scam 1000 $80 items than 1 $80,000 item, because there's the odd possibility of someone going "meh, $80, who cares?" and less people caring about other people getting scammed out of $80. The underreporting ocuring about this topic is probably a mix of a lot of things among this point, but if I would guess I would say that it's because such a small percentage of people getting scammed and those that are being scammed aren't getting scammed for a big chunk of money.
So you're saying only people with small inventories get scammed for not having secured enough accounts? Nope, decently sized streamers have been victims of scams in the community. Recently a brazilian ex-pro player and streamer "Nahzinha" got scammed out of around $30,000, her account compromise? We don't know, the only thing we know for a fact was that the 2-factor authentication did not work properly and she even had herself locked out of the account for over 3 weeks. There are a few other examples with bigger numbers but not exactly account compromising, but I think you can get the point.
How do you know about this? Well, I'm not really a skins collector for myself, as I only have around 150-200 dollars worth of an inventory, but I like to follow the skins scene of CS:GO and I used to be a decently sized trader of the Brazilian Rocket League trading scene on the Xbox back in 2017 so I know a few things about how people can try to do certain things related to skins. Never done anything myself, but had to protect myself against a lot of things that I didn't even imagined were possible on the Xbox Platform, lol.
I have this game on my account, got it from some "free steam keys" website ages ago. It seems like the actual scheme here is not money laundering or something shady like that, but something like selling alot of steam keys to services that "sell steam key loot boxes" or make giveaways, and making profit out of that. Sme people will play the game and use marketplace, then developer can sell steam items or something. There are actually alot of different abusive scheme games on steam, some have 9999 achievements (zup zup is the only I remember, there are 9 parts as I remember), every achievement is given every second played on timer and they contain all the ascii symbols, so that people will buy one cent game to get a way for making words from achievement stand in profile or just getting steam exp AND get steam cards to sell on marketplace. Another game provides servise to host pirate games from steam account. People do all sorts of crazy stuff with services that steam provides.
Gotta love that it only took three episodes to find a scam/shady business/possibly money laundering shenanigans, wonderful world we live in isn't it?
5000 achievements!
10+ levels!
Felt like an instant red flag
Major red flags lol. Thanks for checking out some of my older content!
reminds me of the fact that i have din's legacy on gog, and later on steam, so when i loaded my save from the gog version in the steam version i immediately got a lot of the achievements. the reason i bought the steam version is because it's more up to date and it somehow runs better.
youre reminding me of Josh Strife Hayes and I.m here for it
Definitely influenced by him, he makes great content!
Graeldon on his way to complete every hentai puzzle game
Ah yes, the "as many achievements as possible" games, yeah, I remember some of them. Sadly, I even own two of them, which both are just shitty puzzles with clicking on objects. Both games are actually parts of their own series, that being "Oik" and "Zup!", which contain more and more achievements in every following game. Fortunately, these ones aren't actually asking for lots of money (unless we're talking about endless """sequels""") for them to be playable, they're both working well enough and can be completed in minutes.
By the way, I decided to check how the Zup series is doing, and *HOLY SCHEIßE* it's still going and the most recent game "Zup! Q" came out in March of this year. Heck... Although still not as bad as Anyway, it's main profit is just reselling pretty much the same games for quite low and available price.
Yep, achievement hunter games are abundant on Steam. But at least most of them are reasonably priced, and you know what you're getting.
Anyway is definitely not.
1:49 funny enough, Payday 2 does actually have 5k achievements
TF2 also has the soundtrack as a DLC but it's to listen while using Steam, i mean you can even buy movies or watch tv shows in Steam (for example the Postal movie and Payday The Web Series, but there's probably more)
This smells to me like a cryptominer, if you're not using it as a money laundering scheme, honestly.
Game wants you to leave it open for 30 minutes at a time, and after 2 1/2 hours, you can exchange for one item.
1.The achievement use for letters so you can arrange it for like welcome to my profile or stuff,i see this happened a lot in many many video games to just give player some customization so thier game actually worth something for buying
2.the market some time when the game isnt popular so the items didnt really have many in the market some people just put that item for like million dollars,shady? I literally can put a csgo case and sell it for million dollar,no one gonna buy it but you can do that
This is such a crazy thing, steam just has this sitting up here and it's gone under the radar.
mate, Steam have had shaddier games than this, this is just a way to transfer money between accounts and a profile customization machine
you know i used to think that triple a studios were the peak of greed and scummy practices in the video game industry but my god charging the player for what is probably ONE music track is absolutely ridiculous. i could literally just pull up youtube and be done with it, although considering the achievement spam i think my browser would probably crash or something.
Turns out greed can show up anywhere.
I bought some games to get their achievements. Not because the achievements themselves, but the challenges or the explorations I had to make just get them
the sad part about this game is that i actually really like the artstyle, if only some better gameplay and like, an actual tutorial were added (ignoring it being a broken buggy mess shilling achievements and probably also a pumpndump)
the soundtrack isn't dlc for the game, steam has a music player and you can buy game soundtracks to listen to
although it's still weird how there's no actual in-game music yet there's a soundtrack
12:12 The shadyness is true. While I wont accuse this game of it, one thing steam shovelwear games did was work the Steam Market for profit. The most common way was to farm steam trading cards to convert gems, which then could be made into other cards that had value or sold whole sale. While the emojis and steam chat items are not the same degree, its likely the same operation to farm currency and the use of a low volume, low cost item is the easiest way to move money between steam accounts.
I like how Bendy is invisible because she's black just like the background. I find it odd though that you'd assume that choosing a different character would give you different levels...
My logic was that each character may have a different mechanic and therefore a different set of levels to match. I was wrong.
@@Graeldon I was thinking it'd be more like classic sonic games where each character can go somewhere different in the same one. Up until you selected Sylvia and got a different level
12:53 but they do, most of the time, "deluxe" or "ultimate edition" comes with a day 1 dlc (skin, strong item and so on) and the soundtrack.
Really odd find about the steam market price spikes here! Very curious what it could possible mean?
Another viewer has suggested that it's likely to be Steam marketplace price manipulation. Sounds plausible to me
These items from cheap games are being used by players from Brazil, Russia and other in development countries to transfer funds to Argentinian and Turkish Steam accounts to buy games for cheap at discounted prices. If you sell an item that's often sold (like csgo, tf2 and dota items) for an unusual price, an alert is sent to Steam Support to review the transaction and they lock the account (because it might've been hacked, as someone tried to transfer funds) or change the account country back to the original one if something suspicious is found.
@Graeldon A while ago they were using MercadoPago and PicPay to trick Steam into thinking an argentinian card was being used and create argentinian Steam accounts. But it was fixed.
This video was really good, if i may suggest some obscure steam games nobody else has reviewed, I’d suggest “Piggy Poggy Pog” or the infamous “Gravity Bone”.
🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦
Thanks for the suggestions, they both look interesting! Unfortunately, I'm not taking recommendations for this series... yet. If I'm able to do this full time and produce 2 videos per week, I'm planning on adding a membership tier that allows for suggesting games to be featured on the channel
@@Graeldon all cool, I would love to support you but well, you know how Canada’s economy is currently (at least here in NL). Just found your channel but I really enjoy the tone of them, getting tired of youtubers screaming and being overdramatic. Have a good morning/afternoon depending on what part of the country you're in 💙💙🇨🇦🇨🇦
Cheers! I appreciate all support =)
Canada is definitely expensive enough as is. And yeah, I'm not a fan of that type of content either haha
this is the first time i watch your videos, reminds me of classic AVGN videos but a lot more relaxed, good stuff!
I'm glad you're enjoying the content! Funnily enough, I think I've only ever watched 1 or 2 AVGN videos in my time, so that's quite the coincidence! I don't go for the high energy shouty-style of reviews that many youtubers have been popularizing, that's just not me.
I woke up and a spider was crawling on me bruh what the hell
My first thought was that this game is part of some kind of creepypasta ARG, or perhaps some indie developer's weird artsy protest of microtransactions and lootboxes. Possibly both, who knows?
I’ve got a lvl 3 steam achievement case that spells out, “This Game Fucking Sucks.” Most people just use it to spell their username.
Most people are familiar with “Oik 1-5” a lot of games like that. Most of these games don’t count as games in achievement competitions so most won’t bloat your achievement count in completed games.
This feels like a game I would play in a dream.
That feeling of familiarity but not functioning in the right way is very dream-like. Phones never work properly in dreams for me
llmao dude you found an achievement inflator that lets you spell out words in your steam shelf. You have a wild imagination
Oh, I know what the achievements are used for. But what about the weird item generating system and random price increases?
12:47 That’s just the soundtrack, not a dlc
I wonder if the sheer volume of achievements causing the steam client to crash is intentional.
Trying to keep you there long enough that you exceed the time allowed for a refund
Something I noticed. According to the steam page, the game is only available in English and Russian. A bunch of the achievements specifically use Russian letters as well.
Basically, this game is a Russian scam.
it's more for russian hackers to empty your steam wallet if they get into your account..
Bleh was $500 at one point
I still don't quite understand what the deal is with this game and the items...
@@Graeldon me too but i bought it for .03 and its currently going for .54 cents
@@Heisenburg0r1 That's a decent profit margin! Good way to get funds for your Steam wallet
This game exists solely for people who want to have letters in their achievements. Why? Because you can show off those achievements on your Steam profile in any order you like, and that way you can write something with them.
There are many items on Steam that are 3-10cents that sometimes sell for 10-80€, it even happenes with some csgo items
I love the constant achievement spam throughout the video.
This looks like money laundering
I think there's a very high chance that it is!
12:50 - Actually you are kind of incorrect by that. Square Enix sold the soundtrack to DQ11 as a DLC and the soundtrack in the game was a midi version of the orchestrated one.
fyi around 3:30 there’s a flash, if anyone’s photosensitive
safe at 3:40 (im on mobile browser so i cant edit… i’ll fix it later)
also from 4:47 on during all gameplay i think. if the guy that make the vid sees this, probably add a flashwarning to the title.
Thanks for taking the time to comment this, I'll try to be more mindful of it in the future!
I'm just ganna assume anything that starts with "!" is ganna be trash, as it was done just to push it above the letter A. Pathetic.
That's a pretty fair assumption to make haha
this game kinda feels like the kind of game Steam Farmers would buy? those who are deep into achievement hunts, owning as much games as possible, and weird Steam economy stuff
Can't wait for the #FUNTIME episode.
Those text achievements are dope though
For the thing where the right key turns into the room reset button, just set the room reset button to D.
Tried that, changing the keybind for one key changes both. So if you set it to D, both reset and right are now D, and reset takes priority.
I'm sure someone else has already left a similar comment, but to me it seems like a standard Steam market pump and dump. Buy low (or get low in this case, since the game gives keys to open loot boxes), convince others of the item's value making them buy (raising the price), sell high, get out. The only question is, who is buying these items for these high prices. Most users probably aren't stupid enough to buy worthless junk in a random game for really high prices. If I had to guess, over the years I've heard about people using bots to automatically buy and sell items in order to make a profit. The only time I ever recall seeing one in action was in a video where some TH-camr (don't remember who, sorry) performed a similar trick on some emoticon. I'm not 100% sure who is performing the scam, but in the video you show 10000 avatar crates being sold at once. That amount makes me assume that the developers may be the ones performing the scam. The letter/symbol achievements are just a way to get sales, you can put showcases on your Steam profile. One of those is an achievement showcase, and many people buy games like this in order to spell things out on their profile. Very interesting video, keep up the great work.
Interestingly enough, the background you can by was released on April Fools day of 2021.