Frostpunk 2 a game that doesn’t even have any of its technical aspects confirmed… how do you even try to sell that? It’s not the brightest idea.

Kinguin had someone try to sell Frostpunk 2, which doesn’t have a release date, a price, or an age rating. 11 Bit Studios openly said that we should be patient, as the game might need years to be finished. But no, someone tried to put up a pre-order offer, meaning this person will sit on our cash until the game even releases! (The price is 47 Canadian dollars, roughly 40 USD.)

“announcement! We don’t know the price of our game yet; we don’t have any keys. Some shitty scammer sells Frostpunk 2 on preorder under the umbrella of another crook Kinguin?! […] As a further addition to our announcement about scammers – they have a PEGI rating while we do not know it yet and they embedded our trailer from Epic Games Store while ‘selling Steam keys’ on preorder. Sorry, but this is ridiculous,” the studio wrote on Twitter.

The scam is on multiple levels. The game might cost more than the price set on Kinguin. If someone falls for the fraud, they might only realize years later that they spent money on something and would still have to pay more even to have access to Frostpunk 2’s Steam code (even though the game is confirmed to become available on Epic Games Store and GOG as well). You’d spend much less time and effort by simply waiting for the game to launch and then buy it legally (because let’s admit it: Kinguin is a grey market for game codes… they tend to cause more harm than good for the developers!)

“We used bitter words but not without reason; technically speaking, they are selling something that doesn’t exist. We have access to the game at its current state for internal testing, of course, but we’re not generating keys that could be sold, redeemed, and give players access to the game. Most importantly, we haven’t even started a preorder campaign yet. This means that the false information Kinguin is putting out there can cause many troubles when Frostpunk 2 is officially available for purchase. This could include backlash aimed at us about Kinguin’s preorders and their taken-straight-out-of-space game price if our official preorder price is different.

We could also receive complaints from people who bought those non-existent keys from Kinguin now and then having trouble getting the keys from them down the road. But they [Kinguin] will likely just ignore us as this is something they do with other games. Any legal actions could be complicated as they are—probably for a reason—a Hong Kong-registered company,” 11 Bit Studios said in a statement.

The distance people go to scam others…

Source: PCGamer