Beware the App Store’s Cuphead scam

By

Cuphead
News of this game's arrival on iOS was too good to be true.
Photo: Studio MDHR

Retro-style run-and-gun game Cuphead has landed in the App Store. Unfortunately, it’s not legit!

One of the Xbox’s best games, the retro-inspired Cuphead arrived on consoles back in September, and immediately became a massive hit — thanks to its combination of addictive gameplay and vintage 1930s-style graphics. Sadly, you’ll have to wait to play the real thing on iOS.

Sneakily, the iTunes page for the fake “Cuphead” looks legitimate, complete with the name of developer Studio MDHR. It’s not all accurate, however, with the support page not linking to the official StudioMDHR site, “studiomdhr.com,” but rather a fake one — apparently for a developer based in Hungary.

The real quickly developers took to Twitter to label the imposter version “a scam” and writing that, “We are working on removing the fraudulent app ASAP!”

If you do buy the $5 game, still available in the App Store as of this writing, don’t expect anything good. While it’s playable in the loosest sense, it sports low-res backgrounds, bad animation, and other touches which this up as a cheap scam rather than a genuine port.

It’s no surprise that a game like Cuphead, which has been a giant hit, would have unethical developers trying to cash in on it. A few years ago, after (the much worse, but still addictive) Flappy Bird game became a smash hit, roughly a third of all new games released in the App Store were some form of clone, attempting to make a quick buck.

What’s more surprising is that Apple’s famous quality control would have allowed this knockoff to make it through the screening process. This isn’t the first time this has happened as of late. Last week, an app pretending to be created by MyEtherWallet.com — one of the internet’s leading services for storing ETH and other crypto currency — rose to the top of the App Store rankings, only to turn out to be a fake.

Even in a well-curated store like the App Store, you still need to make sure that what you’re buying is the real thing!

Source: Touch Arcade

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