“They Stole The Whole Game” – Horror Indie Dev Fights The eShop Scam Blatantly Ripping Their Work

Scam games on the Switch eShop are all too common of an occurrence these days. They generally tend to target bigger releases (we’ve seen rip-offs of The Last of Us, TOTK and Pokémon TCG Pocket in recent years), but that’s not to say that indie devs are safe from the cloning, as was recently discovered by The Backrooms 1998 developer, Steelkrill.

The Backrooms 1998 is a found-footage horror game that launched on the Switch eShop earlier this month, after arriving in Steam Early Access back in 2022. It seems to contain all of the chills and thrills that you’d expect from the genre, with creepy mannequins, hidden corners and jump-scares aplenty — not the kind of thing we’d want to play without a cushion to hide behind, but good for those feeling brave.

Importantly, The Backrooms 1998 is not ‘Backrooms Horror Escape’, a found-footage horror game that arrived on the Switch eShop in December 2024 from publisher and developer ‘COOL DEVS S.R.L’. Except, it is. If you ignore the different cover art (seemingly AI-generated on the latter) and a general drop in quality, the games are near identical.

And for those wondering ‘just how identical?’, Steelkrill has kept the receipts. The dev took to Imgur to share some side-by-side comparisons of the two games (of which we’ve included a selection below) and gameplay footage of both the original and its mimic makes the comparisons even clearer.

As you might expect, developer Steelkrill had never heard of ‘Backrooms Horror Escape’ before it was brought to their attention in a video comment, asking why they were re-publishing their game on consoles under a different title. “Long story short,” the dev wrote on Reddit, “this company called ‘COOL DEVS S.R.L’ stole my whole game, ripped it, pasted some bad AI crap on it as a cover, literally made a BAD version of it and just published it on consoles and sold it to trick players into buying it”.

A brief glance at the COOL DEVS eShop lineup reveals this is the studio behind such… *ahem* ‘quality’ releases as Visa Control: USA Border Simulator, Game Empire Tycoon: Dealer Simulator and the shameful TCG Empire: Card Shop Simulator. In short, The Backrooms 1998 appears to be far from the first game the studio has ripped off.

Learning of the rip-off title, the indie dev submitted DMCA takedown requests on ‘Backrooms Horror Escape’ to PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo. While the former two storefronts have since removed the game, it is still available for $8.99 on the Switch eShop. “I still can’t believe that someone as big as Sony, Xbox and Nintendo are letting this slide,” Steelkrill continued on Reddit, “This is not fair on developers and not fair on the players”.

Steelkrill provided us with the following statement, explaining their experience with Nintendo so far:

Nintendo claims to be “looking into it”, but it’s blatantly clear as daylight that the game was stolen, most probably using a program to download all the scenes and assets. It’s an exact 1:1 copy of my game, covered with poorly generated AI assets, and released to mislead players into believing it’s the real thing. All the scenes and assets are the same, the music is the same, the menu is the same and it also includes the voice actor I hired in it as well.

A lot of people have provided some good information on how these companies operate as well and it seems it’s becoming an issue on all platforms, especially on Nintendo. In my opinion, platform holders need to enforce stronger guidelines on the kind of games that get accepted and also [get] better refund and reporting systems.

It’s simply unfair that developers have to go through [this] and also very unfair to unsuspecting buyers thinking they are getting the real game, all this while scammers continue exploiting these loopholes.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time we’ve heard about Nintendo’s slow reaction times to complaints like these. Earlier this month, a developer told IGN that the Big N is “probably the easiest to scam”, and we spoke to a handful of devs last year who all bemoaned the current state of the eShop too.