Just last week developer and publisher 11 bit studios announced Frostpunk 2, a direct sequel to the popular Frostpunk from 2018. Unfortunately, since then, scams around the game have popped up already.
This was revealed in a tweet pointing towards Kinguin, a grey market key reseller that works much like G2A. These marketplaces, which unofficially sell games and keys for other software, work in such a way that resellers not associated with real developers and publishers can sell games.
These sites pop up in the news every so often as their affect on the market is usually detrimental. Back in July 2019 we covered an indie developer who asked that players instead outright pirate their game over of buying it on G2A.
For Frostpunk 2, 11 bit studios points out that a seller on Kinguin is advertising pre-orders for the game despite the fact that keys for it don’t even exist yet.
We won’t link to the page selling the phony version of the game but, at the time of writing it is still up and available to take people’s money.
ANNOUNCEMENT!
We don’t know the price of our game yet, we don’t have any keys. Some SHITTY SCAMMER sells Frostpunk 2 on pre-order under umbrella of another CROOK Kinguin?!
Re-tweet & let’s make some noise to stop it. Media folks?@gameinformer @pcgamer @eurogamer @gamestar_de pic.twitter.com/sx7uX6sciq— Frostpunk ❄ (@frostpunkgame) August 19, 2021
It seems that, using your IP address, the store will change what region is mentioned on the page and currency it is displayed in. You can see the South African application in the header image above changing the price to R563.34.
The original announcement from 11 bit studios, a Polish company, has the page changed for that regional displaying the price in Złoty.
Sitcking in Poland for a second and CD Projekt Red actually retweeted the warning of the scam adding “We’re with you on this one!“. Multiple listings for Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3 and other CD Projekt Red games can be found on Kinguin.
For Cyberpunk 2077, Kinguin even has a custom popup stating “implant yourself with 5 percent off”
“As a further addition to our announcement about scammers – they have PEGI rating while we do not know it yet (!) and they embedded our trailer from Epic Games Store while ‘selling Steam keys’ on pre-order. Sorry, but this is ridiculous,” 11 bit studios adds.
