I wanted to post a small PSA today for people who are like me and play a lot of indie visual novels, because this has become a pretty annoying problem lately:
if you google an indie game and come across some weird website claiming to host it (as seen in the image I provided), offer downloads, walkthroughs, guides for endings and character routes that don't even exist yet, or basically pretending to be an official page when it very obviously isn’t—please don’t use it.
a lot of these websites are pure AI slop made by scammers/ content farms. they scrape information, screenshots, descriptions, walkthroughs, characters, etc. from actual creators, then use generative AI to churn out cheap copies and fake articles pages around them.
the biggest problem is that they also abuse SEO so their garbage sometimes shows up surprisingly high in Google results. indie devs rely a lot on word of mouth and people finding their games organically, so these sites are basically trying to hijack that traffic and redirect clicks, ad revenue and potential players away from the people who actually made the game.
and this isn't just happening to one game. indie VNs are an easy target because smaller creators obviously don't have giant companies constantly monitoring search results for them.
I've already reported 13 different fake websites involving TFC, and unfortunately there are still more out there :')
so if you see one of these sites, the best thing you can do is not click around on it, don't download anything from it, and definitely don't share the link as a source. go through the creator's actual itch.io, Steam, Patreon, Tumblr, Carrd, etc. instead.
you can also report scam/spam pages to Google so they can potentially be removed or pushed out of search results.
and honestly, please spread the word when you see this happening to an indie game. a lot of players probably have no idea these websites are fake in the first place, especially when they're deliberately designed to look legitimate.
support the actual weird little human beings making your weird little games, not the SEO sludge machine stealing their work 😭
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