It's rarely a good sign when you wake up to an entire lock screen full of Tweetbot notifications. That was the case this morning when we posted that Cuphead launched on the App Store. It seems until the actual Cuphead developer started telling people this was a fake, everyone just assumed it was the real deal. We've posted about scam apps in the past and historically, these things are super easy to spot.
The scam typically goes like this: A random developer finds a popular game on Steam, cobbles together a barely working, typically very low quality knock off, and submits it to Apple. The Astroneer scam app that made the rounds earlier this year was a particularly good example of this. If you look at its listing on AppShopper, several things immediately jump out:
- It's published by Gregor Friment and not System Era Softworks.
- It's 100MB, which is about the size of an empty Unity project, while the Steam version recommends 4GB of available disk space.
- The same developer also has also released an iOS version of Rust, another popular Steam game.
- The App Store listing is very low effort, with screenshots that aren't formatted for the device.
- When you actually run the game, it looks like this:
If all the red flags on the App Store listing aren't enough to indicate it's a scam, playing the game always does. In the case of the Astroneer scam, all you can really do in it is walk around inside of a small area and jump. No one will be fooled by this once they get into the game, but that's the whole idea behind these scams: They weaseled through the approval process, fooled you into spending your money, and hope you're lazy enough to not get a refund.
Today's Cuphead scam was particularly sophisticated, which really sets a troubling precedent for the App Store. Here's the App Store listing, which passes the first four bullet points outlined above with flying colors:
There's an actual animated video trailer for the game, the icon looks good, it's 1.9GB which is plausible for a mobile port, and the developer name appears correct. There are absolutely no warning signs aside from the developer using "studiomdhrgames.com" instead of "studiomdhr.com", but they even mirrored the official web site at their domain. Unless you specifically knew their URL did not include "games" in it, nothing looks out of the ordinary.
As mentioned, post-download is where these scams always fall apart. Today, this was not the case. What was released on the App Store was a shockingly functional, unbelievably well done port of Cuphead. Check it out in motion:
Multiple save slots, full cut scenes, virtual controls that match the art style of the original, and more. We've never seen a scam app of this level of quality before, and the precedent this sets is honestly quite scary. We raced to post about it this morning after being tipped off of its existence because quite literally everything about this game seemed legit. Until the developers came out and said it was a scam, the only clue that it wasn't was mismatched whois information on the game's associated URL, and I honestly have never been in a situation covering video games for the last decade where cross-referencing whois information was anything you even had to think about.
Due to the nature of the App Store and the weird way games are released on it, it is very normal for games to just randomly pop up at 2:00 AM like Cuphead did. It's typical for big games to be released without a single mention from the studio, as bigger studios will often employ PR firms which are notoriously slow compared to the speed of the App Store. Also, just last week alone, we've seen some amazing ports hit the App Store, which makes a Cuphead iOS release the week before Christmas seem totally normal. This time of year is filled with surprises.
If you downloaded Cuphead because of our news story this morning, I'm incredibly sorry. This is the first time in the history of TouchArcade this sort of thing has happened, and it's ultra troubling to me that a scam app of this quality is the new normal. The good news is, the game has since been removed from the App Store, and getting a refund should be incredibly easy. If you've never been through the refund process before, the best guide I've seen is over on iMore which walks you through absolutely everything you need to do, with screenshots of every step.
We're going to be reevaluating how we handle posting about new games to avoid this happening again in the future, and hopefully everyone sticks with us while we come up with new ways to filter out these sorts of shockingly sophisticated scams while still providing up to the second coverage of new games on the App Store.
The 'Cuphead' Scam and TouchArcade: What Happened posted first on http://ift.tt/2k0LiGW
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