I’ve come across a rather strange phenomenon on Steam and it revolves around games that look like asset flips and sell for $200. Where do these games come from? Who are they selling to? Why are they priced at two hundred smackeroos? Are they all money laundering schemes? I don’t recommend going to the links in this article and buying any of these games, unless you think that burning $200 is worth flexing on the friends who will abandon you once they realize how criminally irresponsible you are with money.

For the record I deliberately left out a number of games that were clearly for educational/training purposes, games put up on Steam for pop-up events, and titles that are clearly trolling. This is also not the complete set of $200 Steam games by a large margin, just a carefully selected sample size of those that would show up with Valve’s wonderful search engine filtering by price.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

#1: MouseRun (pictured above)

Mouse Run showed up on the Steam store on December 20, 2019 and is sold by an “atm games.” The game is Chinese-made and its original title is ???? which roughly translates to “Uncle Rat Run” It costs $199.99.

#2: Strike Mole

If you really want to play Strike Mole, I have good news. You can do so without spending more than $25. Plus tax. Strike Mole is a $200 asset flip of the Unity Store game Whack a Mole and you can buy the package for $25, zip it yourself, and play to your heart’s content. Another game by a fly by night developer who happens to also be Chinese.

#3: CrisisActionVR

Crisis Action VR is another game available in English and Simplified Chinese by a developer (Pixel Wonder) that only published one game. SteamDB shows that Crisis Action VR was once $20 but in April 2018 the price inexplicably rose to $200. Maybe the developer no longer wishes to sell it? Maybe they don’t understand decimal points. Your guess is as good as mine. Crisis Action VR is the only game on this list that looks like it came the closest to being a real game.

#4: LLK

LLK is definitely a pre-bought asset package for a mobile game, of what I would be lying if I implied I had any intention of searching around for the answer to. The game peaked at 6 players on Steam and has never changed its price from the $200, so it LLK is a money laundering scheme than it has cleaned at least $1200 USD with $360 going to Valve as their cut. Who knows, maybe this is medical grade memory testing software. I wrote my name down wrong this week, maybe LLK can help.

This one isn’t available in Chinese but the developer is Chenyun0577. I’ll let you make your conclusions.

#5: NUMBER

I’m starting to see a trend here. The previous game LLK was created by Chenyun0577, and NUMBER was created by rongyao0577. Two Chinese developers with names that sound like a bot generated them? Nope, nothing suspicious here. They also released on the same day. Coincidence, surely. NUMBER had five players max concurrently playing it.

Those money launderers sure do like memory games. Maybe it helps them remember where all their money is being funneled.

#6: Adventure Trip

Adventure Trip is available on the iOS store, and I assume it doesn’t cost $200 there. Adventure Trip is available from a developer with one game and, you guessed it, in Simplified Chinese. Unlike the last games on this list, if anyone actually bought into this scheme they haven’t actually played the game. Adventure Trip has five followers but no activity charted.

This game can be played free here. Thanks Reddit.