Update (noon ET): The Steam listing for City of Heroes Superman Edition was removed shortly after this piece went live. You can still view it through this Internet Archive link. butler-boschma review Attacking the game as a scam is archived here.
Valve has yet to respond to Ars’ request for comment.
Origin story:
A video of Butler-Boschma’s Unreal Engine 5 demo, which he posted in April.
Back in April, indie developer Tyson Butler-Boschma released a free, Unreal Engine 5-powered “Superman Style Flight Experience” on itch.io. Now, he says, scammers have been selling a stolen version of that demo on Steam for weeks without permission or any apparent action from Valve.
City of Heroes Superman Edition launched on Steam on November 1, with developer Hero Game Studios describing the game as “a unique experience where you can choose your own hero and go on an adventure across a large realistically modeled map.” Can.” It has since sold for up to $35, despite being a carbon copy of Butler-Boschma’s long-free demo.
After noting the Steam version as a “scam”. 1 November tweetButler-Boschma posted on Steam November 9th review alleging that Steam developer Hero Game Studios had “just downloaded, stolen, and passed off this work.”
crime is happening
in response to reviewHero Game Studios claims that Butler-Boschma is one of their “former developers” who left the project and is now trying to claim the rights to the game for profit (even though the itch.io demo has always been free). Is). “It’s a lie, I don’t know who they are,” writes Butler-Boschma. “They claim to have created this game… that’s also a lie.”
It looks like Butler-Boschma has a lot of evidence on their side on this one. On the itch.io demo page posted in April, Butler-Boschma describes a free “just for fun” demo that’s “simply a test to see if a future superhero game like Superman is going to scale.” How can it be in the modern city. UE5.” That page is also clear about the fact that the demo is built on top of Epic. the matrix awakens City prototype, with the main character simply replaced with “a flying superhero version of my own design”.
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“I made this demo months ago as a proof of concept, using mostly free assets,” Butler-Boschma wrote in his Steam. review, “I was always open and honest about it…”
The Steam page for City of Heroes, on the other hand, only lists one Twitter account. made in late september And posted only a few screenshots of the game. It doesn’t appear that the studio has any other games or any web presence to back up its claims for the title or any long-term development work. And that’s not even getting into the obvious copyright issues of selling a game with “Superman Edition” in the title without a license from DC Comics or Warner Bros.
Enlarge / Getting ready to crash.
Despite all this, Butler-Boschma also says that Hero Game Studios has gone after his YouTube account, using the copyright strike system to remove videos of demos he posted in April. that copyright strike apparently refer to the steam page for the game As evidence that Hero Game Studios “wants this game, which is ours, removed from this video.”
“They’re attacking straight to the point and bothering me,” Butler-Boschma tweeted, “I do not feel safe providing my personal information for a counterclaim…”
If all of this sounds somewhat familiar, it may be due to its similarity to the summer incident in which NiFTy Arcade copied and sold unlicensed versions of freely available HTML5 games on GameStop’s NFT Marketplace. Both situations show how easy it is for scammers to use lax marketplace moderation standards to try to profit from freeware games made by others, and how vigilant freeware game makers need to be for signs of such piracy. is required.
Valve has not yet responded to a request for comment from Ars Technica.
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