A web3 free-to-play survival game found to be a front for installing malware on your PC has finally been removed from Steam

Reported to have amassed over 7,000 players, a free-to-play web3 game named PirateFi launched on Steam last week and was subsequently taken down for containing “malicious files”. Users reportedly found out about this takedown as Valve took to notifying players that their rigs could be compromised.

As spotted by SteamDB, the site known for tracking Steam data (via PC Mag), users who downloaded survival crafter PirateFi were informed that “The Steam account of the developer for this game uploaded builds to Steam that contained suspected malware”.

As a result of this, Valve urges users to either run a “full-system scan using an antivirus product that you trust or use regularly” or “consider fully reformatting your operating system to ensure that no malicious software remains on your machine”. Both are smart ways of counteracting potential malware but this is a worrying message to get from a trusted platform such as Steam either way.

The Steam reviews for the game paint a suspicious story. The first few days of launch saw a handful of positive reviews, from accounts that had played the game for no more than two hours, though many of them aren’t entirely fresh accounts. The latter point is normally a good sign of legitimacy.

However, later negative reviews are mostly from fresh accounts, accusing the game of stealing their data, spending their Steam wallet, and one user even suggests the game’s screenshots are stolen from another pirate game. Given that the new negative reviews are from fresh accounts accusing the game of stealing their old accounts, those old accounts could potentially account for some of the positive reviews.

According to PC Mag, a Telegram account named Jose Andres offered people $17 an hour to moderate the web3 survival pirate game. In those same chats, they claim the game has had over 7,000 players. It seems this ‘job’ was just a scam to get more people to play the game as part of the induction process for it was to download PirateFI.

After being active for six days, Valve took action and took the game down on February 12. Based on the SteamDB figures, it seems likely the 7,000 players figure was just part of the talk to build up trust for their scam as the game has an all-time peak of five players. However, many report the game doesn’t open so the likelihood of having many concurrent players is pretty low. According to those analytics, Gamalytic reckons the game got around 800 downloads and VG Insights thinks that number is up to around 1,500.

Either way, this sets a bad precedent for the safety of the Steam store and we don’t yet know about internal changes made by Valve to catch future attempts. Hopefully, this remains an isolated event.

We have reached out to Valve for comment.