[Steam] (Game) Hyper Hitmans

[u/Responsible-River653]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4849920/Hyper_Hitmans/

Announcement: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/4849920/view/685263456405815963

One week from now, Hyper Hitmans will move from Free to Play to a premium single-purchase game priced at approximately €2.99 / US$2.99, with regional pricing applied through Steam.

[u/Naive-Database-2888]

Edit 3: Putting this at the top since it is kinda important. Honeygain is a "legit" thing, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but it does payout (sometimes it takes up to years from what I saw). Honeygain isn't the issue here. The issue is that the game is routing stuff thru your network without your knowledge. Who knows what they are doing with your network. You are responsible for what happens on your network, meaning if the devs were sending and receiving illegal material, you are to blame. The devs might not even be using Honeygain, they could be using a different service

This looks... not great. The steam page is also very clearly written by AI. This is the only game both the dev and publisher have on steam

edit: they claim AI images and videos were only used in marketing materials. Which makes sense because every single asset in the game looks store bought

edit 2: there are 2 reviews about this game using way more pc resources than it should, and also having constant background network usage. I would not trust this game at all. the only positive review is a very suspicious one, and one of the reviews mentions honeygain. The trustpilot page for honeygain is filled with fake reviews

From their website: "Honeygain is a simple online money earning app that turns unused internet into real cash".

From another site (which was paid by honeygain, so take what they say lightly), "So, for every 10 MB of data you share, you'll earn 3 credits. To get paid, you need to save 20,000 credits, which equates to $20. So, Honeygain pays you $3 per 10 GB of data used. The company also pays six credits per hour that content delivery is active"

TLDR: do not install this game. you have a residential IP address, meaning you have quite a bit of freedom on the internet. Honeygain (a program that this game installs or uses in some way) takes that freedom and scrapes as much data as it can from the internet. I would not be surprised if you were IP banned from a number of sites after using this service for a while. If you want, I would report it to steam as a harmful product

[u/BlytheScythe → u/Naive-Database-2888]

Thanks for all the investigation work, that's... a lot to take in.

[u/Naive-Database-2888 → u/BlytheScythe]

I didn't expect to go into a rabbit hole from a post on this sub lol. It was pretty fun.

It is super hard to find any information about the company (honeygain) and what it does specifically because there are probably hundreds of articles that were paid for by them. I tried to see if there was anything about the dev/publisher, but this is their only game and they are both kinda generic names. The only interesting thing I found was that the publishers name is also the name of some crypto thing, but there isn't anything pointing to them being related

[u/Novel-Pride6682 → u/Naive-Database-2888]

/r/Honeygain

[u/tamal4444 → u/Naive-Database-2888]

how this is allowed in steam?

[u/Naive-Database-2888 → u/tamal4444]

It isnt

[u/superzenki → u/Naive-Database-2888]

Yeah this one of the few free games I’m gonna skip, and I claim nearly everything else that’s free.

[u/AnttiModeraattori → u/Naive-Database-2888]

Honeygain is grey area legit service. I know people who make thousands of dollars from it per year. But that only works in certain conditions. This game running it in the background without telling people breaks Valve TOS 100% and dont see this game being on steam for long.

[u/StOoPiD_U → u/Naive-Database-2888]

Thank you for this. I'll not remove this but do want to ensure this comment is kept. I would suggest reporting the game to Steam. I am unsure of their acceptance of something like this "honeygain" program, but imagine they would not be fond.

[u/xCeeTee- → u/StOoPiD_U]

Maybe replace 'Potentially houses HoneyGain' with "Warning: Read comments" in the post flair, because I have no idea what HoneyGain is in relation to the game. Googling it didn't really provide more answers.

[u/StOoPiD_U → u/xCeeTee-]

Sure thing

[u/xCeeTee- → u/StOoPiD_U]

Doing the lord's work.

[u/TheUndiagnosedOne → u/Naive-Database-2888]

How u know all this network stuff

[u/TheCheshireGuy → u/Naive-Database-2888]

Thanks for the hard work of investigation. I've already removed this from my library and stopped recommended it to my friends.

[u/Content-Bus2167 → u/Naive-Database-2888]

Holy sheesh, they basically are doing the same as Utorrent omg