Earlier this week, the internet collectively swarmed Amazon for its fourth annual Prime Day. While the day brought record sales for Amazon, it did not occur without controversy. Prime Day continued during a rise of employee strikes in Europe, as well as numerous criticisms and calls for boycotts stateside in response to their work environment policies. While Prime Day itself is over, the site is also facing more controversy, but this time related to their video game sales. A Redditor discovered that pirated video games were recently sold through Amazon listings before being taken down.

Redditor CodependentlyWealthy recently shared their findings on a Reddit post that discovered indie game Frostpunk being sold for $2.99, well below its normal selling price. CodependentlyWealthy thought the sale to be suspicious, and while supposedly not interested in the game itself, the user felt this a fitting mystery worth solving. Sure enough, the Redditor’s $3 purchase led to a discovery that the game was indeed pirated. According to their post, “Someone took the GOG version of the game, repackaged it with their own installer signed and published by ‘Ace Media Group LLC’ and submitted it to Amazon. They left GOG-specific metadata files and Galaxy64.dll (for GOG Galaxy client integration) in the install dir.”

Not long after this discovery and reporting of it by several news outlets, Amazon has since listed Frostpunk as unavailable.

A separate Redditor, jbswsh, subsequently discovered the same case occurring with the game Surviving Mars, when it was on sale for $3.99 on Amazon. Upon inspection, the same GOG files were found, and the listing for Survivng Mars has also been listed as unavailable on Amazon. While this certainly is an unprofessional error onthe company’s part, given their massive slate of offerings on the site, both physical and digital, it can be understood that lesser-known titles like these could fall victim to piracy. It is good that Amazon acted quickly to remedy this, and hopefully this story leads to a net positive for these independent games by boosting their sales thanks to this sleuthing story. What do you guys think about these pirated video games having Amazon listings? Let us know in the comments below!

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