The indie game developers of "ShieldWall" (Nezon Productions) exposed for Fraud on Steam

[Kuviot]

This might be a waste of time because I have many other things to do in life, but this needs to be heard because I have been trying for days to make a post about this scummy game studio on reddit, but I don't have enough Karma to post on almost any of them, and the Steam moderation team keeps ignoring my game reports of this company with solid evidence:

Introduction:

Nezon Productions is an indie game studio that made a paid game called Formata on December 7th, 2017, and it was mostly about being in warfare with multiple armies like in RTS games, but you can actually control your armies and rally them in 3rd person, take objectives to get more money, some maps had hard to learn boating mechanics, it was a really fun game for a lot of people (including me). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO3PjUnM_yQa

Thousands of players were buying Formata, and when Nezon Productions started to realize how many millions of views Formata was raking in on youtube, Nezon Productions abandoned Formata and started working on a new game project called ShieldWall which was to be the same core gameplay as Formata but more polished; with all new textures, models, and an art style that made it not look like a unreal engine testing game.

On March 23, 2020, Nezon Productions released ShieldWall in an early access state and remained that way up until April 18th 2023. However, right at the this time, everybody who had purchased Formata was no longer able to play the game they paid for (including me and many of my friends who bought the game):

Formata Steam charts: https://steamcharts.com/app/580040

Discussions about the game crashing for every player: https://steamcommunity.com/app/580040/discussions/0/3194741517068199241/

https://steamcommunity.com/app/580040/discussions/0/1711816076700680167/

https://steamcommunity.com/app/580040/discussions/0/3270185687338723162/

"Report bugs here discussion" on their discussions page has almost no up to date things about the game crashing because their indie team was removing anybody who said anything about it crashing: https://steamcommunity.com/app/580040/discussions/0/2579854400744554293/

My own private youtube video of the game crashing when launching it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_2-XqPWCLU

Nezon Productions made a intentional script which crashes the game on startup after a few minutes. Its on purpose but steam doesnt want to respond to me, and they know that stuff like this is going on even with other games most definintly, but they don't care about it. Here is another smilair reddit post to how steam is handling these kinds of developers breaking their TOS and committing Fraud, etc, but steam refuses to do anything about it so that they can keep all of the hundreds of dollars spent for a product that you can't even play: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1cay95k/malicious_devs_falsely_banning_users_on_steam/

I am not the only person who reported this game studio with solid evidence of them breaking terms of service on steam and commiting fraud. They delete all of their game reviews if it mentions anything about crashing related to a intentional script on their steam discussions, and they intentionally don't make a public discord or reddit so that people can't complain about this. They also don't have a website or anywhere to see where they are based in. They are most definintly in Russia or China, so sueing them is out of the question, but Steam could do something about banning them from the platform, or giving everybody a refund who bought Formata, however I'm still waiting on 3 of my reports for the game that I made around a year ago, but they insist upon keeping my money along with all of the other gamers who bought their game and got scammed. Steam is bad and this game studio is bad too.

I'm thinking about starting a lawsuit, but it just takes so much time and money that its so stupid. Steam this giant corporation can just ignore this stuff because you don't have the money and time to fight them.

[KalGimpa]

there are three posts about it crashing on the front page

one from years ago

there is also a post that has a couple of people putting together a game

so it must work for some

unless you have proof of a script that crashes the game

i would say it is just a dead game

[Ben Lubar]

Developers can't remove reviews from their game; they can only report them like any other Steam user.

The fact that the game has mixed reviews and barely any recent reviews seems to indicate that it's just a game that got through Greenlight and then didn't go much of anywhere after that.

The reddit thread you linked is about a completely unrelated developer, and I don't see any evidence of game bans being abused here.

The forum threads you linked to seem to indicate that the crash does not happen in offline mode, so likely it's a bug related to the official servers no longer being run by the company and not an intentional act of sabotage.

[76561199648916059]

Due yourself a favor and avoid small time developers and publishers, people in general are scammy and no name studios today are the worse, take this as a lesson even top rated studios release garbage from time to time.

Also wait a few months before you buy games and never buy early access, hope this experience has helped you learn about the dangers of online gaming stores and the products they sell, there is no warranty and it is never know if or for how long it will work.