It’s nothing new – people are always down for gettin’ the good stuff for free. In the gaming industry, it’s a very common occurrence for developers to get a plethora of emails asking for free copies of their games for whatever reason; reviews, streaming, giveaways … they like free shit. But one developer took his ire at discovering a fake coffee shop looking for free key codes and uploaded it into a hilarious post on Imgur. There’s a lot of talk about hot magenta nipples … you’ve been warned.

Jacob Janerka, developer over at Paradigm, decided to share his run-in with a fake video game-themed coffee shop in a hilarious way – an internet rant. The “shop” requested free game keys for their gaming trivia nights, which actually sounds really cool … if it were real. In this case, not so much and Janerka isn’t having it. The developer started out his rant by stating:

Hi, my name is Jacob Janerka the developer of Paradigm and I would like to introduce you to “The Wacky Adventures of Steam Key Scammers” where the creative romanticism of making indie games gets smothered with a musty donut pillow a developer may use to avoid hemorrhoids while sitting down for an unhealthy amount of hours.

Our little journey begins with the apathetic deleting of hordes of fake Steam key request emails from fake emails, fake websites and fake enthusiasm. Normal scam emails are generally easy to spot; non specific greeting, clearly cookie cutter description of your amazing game, and of course 3-4 extra keys for the TEAM of eager writers from really legit websites with 2 visitors a day.

However a recent scam email caught my attention on how deep it went. Now I’m cool with people pirating my game, I prefer sales, but generally those people who pirate either cant afford it, or they weren’t going to buy the game anyway or they will support my art in other ways. However it gets my nipples in a hot magenta pink rage when people profit from scammed keys on grey key markets like G2A. Here is the first email.”

The original email in question can be found here, on the original post. The standard reach out: “Hi, I’m blah blah blah with blah and blah and we’d like a free code for blaaaah.” You know, the usual. But this is where the nipple play comes in (er, what?). Janerka then goes on to display the various messages he received, including fake social media accounts for this alleged coffee shop. The puzzle begins to make sense as the developer lays out exactly how the revelation of this farce occured – and he was pissed.

DMITRY YOU LIED TO ME, I BELIEVED IN YOU, you were going to promote my game in your cafe, I could of been an indie darling with millions of dollars, and we would sip your delicious coffee and live like kings in Eastern Europe, eating marinated herring and getting alcohol poisoning because my Australian binge drinking lifestyle was still not ready for 50c vodka shots. You said you opened up three weeks ago, but its been open since 2016. MY NIPPLES ARE A HOT PINK MAGENTA RIGHT NOW, furious with rage.

Was it really worth researching all that just to find out if the email was a scam. Probably not. Was it worth writing the polite but smug passive aggressive email back to Dmitry telling him he shouldn’t scam keys. Probably not. Should I have just ignored the email and done work, instead of pretend I am some sort of detective genius… Yes.

Seriously though, fuck scammers, especially ones taking advantage of small devs trying to get coverage, which probably have to work as a barista themselves to pay rent. This concludes the Wacky Adventures of Steam Key Scammers for now, tune in next week as I continue find new unique ways to procrastinate on making new games. -Jacob Note: Dmitry has yet to reply to my polite but smug passive aggressive email TL;DR Someone tries to scam me out of my Steam keys with semi believable story, I investigate, nipples get hot magenta pink. I find out its a scam through top notch realistic detective work.”

Moral of this story? Don’t scam. Scamming leads to hot nipples and apparently nobody wants that.