https://store.steampowered.com/app/490990/Penguins_Cretins/

FINAL UPDATE - 13/06/2020 Final update(?) - After over a year after the change occurred, Valve seemingly have convinced the developers to revert the game back to its original promised form. The purchasers now have access back to Aiball and the developer has responded the the game swap.

This can all be read on here: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Sentinels_of_the_Store/announcements/detail/2420069741595460959

UPDATE - 12/06/2020 - A follow up post has been made today addressing the legalities of what has occurred here from the mouth of a contract lawyer and also highlighting other games that have indulged in this practice as well. The updated article can be found here.

UPDATE - 08/06/2020 - A user of the group went ahead and contacted Steam Support and talked with a Steam representative about this game in question.

This is what the representative had to say:

Originally posted by Steam:

Hi there,

Thank you for contacting Steam.

I had a look at your account. The game Aiball is still activated on the account.

It seems like the producer of the game changed the name, like you mentioned, to Penguins Cretins. I have no information available to me to what the decision behind the name change is. Please keep in mind that the game is listed as an Early Access game. That means that the name and the content of the game are not a finished product and are subject to change at any given time without notice.

If you have any further questions about the game I'd recommend you contact the publisher of the game directly.

You can reach Penguins Cretins support by using the information from the Official Support section here.

Kind Regards

Steam Support

This is a very demotivating and frustrating response as it reflects that Steam are seemingly still not understanding the true weight and the quote it's self sets a negative precedent as to how much game developers can throw around the early access label. The matter is far more than a simple "name change" as the screenshots in this post show, it was a literal game swap. There was no smooth transition between a physics based football game changing into a penguin obstacle course game.

I won't be dropping this topic anytime soon though, and I'd like to say a big thank you to everyone who have been supportive of this and are voicing their contempt for what's happening in this case. Those that are going through appropriate methods to make this more known such as tagging your favourite influencers on Twitter and just generally sharing the post, I really appreciate it and I hope this does spread further just to ensure that this kind of action isn't stood for and doesn't go unnoticed.

On that note, I also want to pass thanks to users that have reached out to me on both Twitter and Discord to alert me of other cases of this happening time and time again in the past, and so I will be making a follow-up post in the future tackling those other titles.

Just as a small little addition as well, I was asked on Twitter if there was any existing videos of both game's gameplay and so I dug out some YouTube videos of two different YouTubers playing both iterations of the game if you wanted more than just a screenshot to go off:

Aiball: Drunks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DlgQBr5Co

Penguins Cretins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztI-AZupVAU

--ORIGINAL ARTICLE--

I want to issue my thanks to Connor from MMOFallout[mmofallout.com] for making me aware of this matter. I believe it is something serious, something that warrants attention and something that I think needs further action taken on it. If you want to show Connor support, go give him a follow on Twitter to see updates about his website and when he posts.

The game I linked at the top of this post is called Penguin Cretins. It's developed by HFM Games, who have a portfolio of basically poorly made games that are laughably bad in terms of both their premise and their execution.

Penguin Cretins bucks the norm in terms of just being a bad Steam game, but there's a more interesting case behind this game that doesn't meet the eye. The game that is currently Penguin Cretins wasn't always Penguin Cretins. The store page for Penguin Cretins lists the game as being released on June 22nd, 2016. This is kind of true and kind of not. The store page it's self has been around for that long, but Penguin Cretins wasn't the game that was originally released on that date. SteamDB alterations[steamdb.info] showcase that Penguin Cretins was merely the result of a game replacement where the guys at HFM Games decided to completely remove the contents of their previous game that was listed on the page and replace it entirely with something completely new. The game that was originally on this page that many users bought and now no longer have was called Aiball: Drunks, which was a very different game compared to Penguin Cretins. This change happened in March 2019, just over two and a half years after the game was originally released.

Aiball: Drunks was a multiplayer party game with janky/wacky game physics that looked like this[mmofallout.com]. Penguin Cretins is a multiplayer game where you guide penguins through an obstacle course, that looks like this.

This is problematic in a number of ways. For one, the people that bought Aiball: Drunks now can no longer play it and are stuck with a product that they never bought and potentially, don't want. When the swap occurred, the files were entirely replaced and as a result, is an incredibly anti-consumer practice for these developers to take away a product that people did buy and many were unhappy when they realised the game they had bought was replaced with something they didn't buy.

Originally posted by MateusAuri:

Why did they swap Aiball for this "Penguins Cretins" stuff? That's really weird!

Originally posted by Supersmo:

In 2016 I bought a game called Aiball which was mainly a physics based soccer game for lots of local players. Aiball was never finished, instead the developer replaced Aiball with a completely different game called Penguins Cretins.

Pengins Cretins has NOTHING to do with the game I once purchased and looks like a way to publish a new game without going through the proper process of publishing a game on Steam.

Don't support this kind of behaviour from developers.

Secondly, it highlights a great flaw with Steam's system if they allow developers to do this. Like I said, this happened back in March 2019 and Valve didn't batter an eye when the developer made such a large alteration to the files that were present, such as completely replacing it.

Thirdly, which is arguably the worst result of what happened, Aiball: Drunks had Windows, Mac and Linux support. When the files got swapped for Penguin Cretins, Penguin Cretins only had Windows support. So as a result, this move rendered a product that people bought unplayable.

Originally posted by murdockscott:

Some kind of error or switch has gone on here. I purchased "Airball" and now it links me to this penguin game that does not even support my OS.

People have been reporting this game ever since this happened for it partaking in fraud and there has been no action taken by Valve, no comment has been given by the developer, both of these being the case for over a year.

This kind of action needs to be taken more seriously, it creates a negative precedent for future developers to do this sort of action of posting new games through illegitimate means and methods that harm the paying customer. This developer has unlawfully removed a product from users that have paid for them through legitimate methods, and in some cases, rendered what they replaced it with as unplayable for some.

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