The recent release The Backrooms 1998 has allegedly been stolen, decompiled, and repackaged with a different title by a group of scammers.
The developer Steelkrill Studios recently posted a thread on social media explaining what happened, alongside evidence showing how “COOL DEVS”, a publisher has stolen their work and republished it.
A big scam company just stole my WHOLE game from steam, ripped it and sold it as their own on Playstation and other consoles.
More details in the thread to hopefully prevent both other developers and people from getting scammed
(1/10) pic.twitter.com/53ib17dSzr
— Steelkrill
| Horror Game Dev (@steelkrill) February 27, 2025
At a glance, other “COOL DEV” games include ripoffs of Chained Together and Liar’s Bar (these are the names of the legitimate games).
The alleged scammers are seemingly a known issue in the game dev community and many of their “games” appear to be absent from Steam where more savvy users might catch them.
The Backrooms 1998 is available now for PC (via Steam), Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, PS4, and PS5.
At the time of writing, the allegedly stolen version of the game from COOL DEVS is still on the Nintendo eShop.
