What might be going on with this indie game "fansite"?
I recently came across an interesting-looking indie game, Idols of Ash. Basically, you have to use a simple grapple-and-swing mechanic to descend through an eldritch underground complex while being pursued by a dangerous "murderpede" monster.
I first played it on what I thought was the official site, idolsofash.fun. It's a pretty spiffy design, with a playable web version, extensive FAQs, strategy guides, and embedded images and video of the game. But I ran into some bugs while playing -- no sound effects, weird lighting. When I mentioned these flaws on the developer's Itch.io page, they responded that they had nothing to do with the site.
Turns out it has a disclaimer at the very bottom: "Unofficial fan site. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Leafy Games." Buying and installing the actual version solved my tech issues. And in playing the game more, I noticed that the various guides on the site were subtly wrong in a lot of ways. The About page claims it's maintained by a big fan of the game, but in hindsight the whole thing seems AI-written and full of hallucinations.
Thing is, I don't get the angle here. There's no advertising on the site. It prominently links directly to the game's official Steam and Itch pages, so they're not trying to deliver malware or intercept the developer's sales. I assume the glitches are from a poor decompilation and rehosting of the original Godot engine game, but there's nothing to be gained from that. The presence of images and video suggests some level of human involvement in the site design, meaning it's not some cheap fire-and-forget thing. The URL and content are far too specific to flip into something else after gaining SEO rank. It presents (and acts) exactly like a non-commercial labor-of-love fansite (albeit one that shares the paid game for free in a broken state).
Could this be a genuine, if misguided, attempt by an actual fan to share the game using AI tools? Or is there some kind of scam I'm not seeing? Is this sort of fake AI fansite with embedded versions of the game a widespread problem with indie titles now?
There we go.
I think it's not worth jumping to AI conclusions, or starting a witch-hunt; just let the fan have fun with their site.
I've been poking around for info about this and that About page is definitely not being truthful. The whole site is AI slop. From what I can tell so far, it's fairly trivial to extract a
.pckfile from a Godot game and redistribute it as WASM.Like OP said there are no ads on this site but there are definitely network requests hitting
ep1.adtrafficquality.google,ep2.adtrafficquality.google,pagead2.googlesyndication.com, andgoogleads.g.doubleclick.net. Looks like maybe the ads are loading in iframes? I'm not sure what the latest trends in ad fraud are but I'd guess the operator is trying to get the revenue while trying to keep the ads hidden from view.I searched around and found a bunch of sketchy "play free online" sites hosting this particular game. And many others. I saw Godot games but also Unity and even Scratch. There's a pretty active ecosystem of junk sites serving up pirated web games for ad impressions. Looks like they're all passing around this same WASM build of Idols of Ash and I'm not sure of its provenance. Still investigating that to see if I can figure out when it was made and maybe by whom.
The game (currently) doesn't have a web build so it may not be using the Godot backend compatible with them, converting a project from one backend to another would likely trigger issues observed like with the lighting, especially for 3D web builds since those have been particularly finicky compared to 2D in my experience.
The game page itself says the game is 20-40min, I'm hard pressed to believe the about page claiming "way too many hours" of anything in the game.
But yes it is tragically easy to decomp Godot games, even using the included encryption method.
Thanks for digging further! I agree the writing smacks of AI in tone and confabulation, despite claiming otherwise.
I wonder if the Google tracking code is related to the embedded YouTube videos?
I'm 90% sure the writing is AI-generated, or at least heavily AI-assisted. Even setting aside the strangely high amount of effort to exhaustively document a small indie title that's not especially complex, it includes a lot of false information that no dedicated fan of the game would write. For example, it misidentifies the name of save points and the appearance of health powerups, invents a scroll-wheel zoom (while missing the more basic sprint key), and hallucinates the behavior of the monster. It also comes up with story dialogue I never saw in the game, and the screenshots don't really correspond to what the captions describe.