The world continues to get colder and bigger threats arise. Society's expansion and survival will have its cost as demands and expectations of various factions will raise tensions and evoke conflicts. The Frostpunk 2 Steam key listing (opens in new tab) remains online.Of course, this doesn't come without its challenges. We have since removed this and made it clear to anyone visiting our site that the game is available for preorder only.' 'We apologize for the inclusion of unconfirmed information that appeared in the listing on in regard to Frostpunk 2. 'We know there is much excitement surrounding the upcoming release of Frostpunk 2 and want to connect fans with merchants who are offering the key,' Doerfler said.

In a statement of its own released on August 19, Kinguin acting CEO and CFO Brandon Doerfler denied that the reseller was doing anything untoward, and said that the listing has been adjusted to be clearer that it is only for a preorder. 'Any legal actions could be extremely difficult as they are-probably for a reason-a Hong Kong-registered company. 'But they will likely just ignore us as this is something they do with other games,' it said. We could also receive complaints from people who bought those non-existent keys from Kinguin now and then having trouble actually getting the keys from them down the road.'ġ1 Bit Studios said it would like to see industry-wide action against this sort of thing, and in the meantime may try to have the Frostpunk 2 preorder page taken down. This could include backlash aimed at us about Kinguin's pre-orders and their taken-straight-out-of-space game price if our official pre-order price is different. This means that the false information Kinguin is putting out there can cause a bunch of troubles when Frostpunk 2 is officially available for purchase. 'Most importantly, we haven't even started a preorder campaign yet. 'We have access to the game at its current state for internal testing, of course, but we're not generating keys that could be sold, redeemed, and give players access to the game.' 'We used bitter words but not without a reason technically speaking, they are selling something that doesn't exist,' 11 Bit Studios said in a statement.

It's clearly intended to take advantage of people who aren't paying attention or just don't know any better. This particular situation is dodgy at best: The listing states that keys 'will be delivered upon the game's release date,' but that could be-likely will be, according to 11 Bit Studios-literally years away, and because a price hasn't been set it's very possible that people will end up paying more through Kinguin than they would if they'd just gone straight to Steam or Epic. G2A is probably the most notorious of the bunch: It's been accused of fraudulent behavior by studios including Gearbox, TinyBuild, and Unknown Worlds, and other indie developers have gone so far as to ask cheapskates to pirate their games rather than buy them from the reseller. Resellers can be a bit of a Wild West: They provide a way for people to make a few bucks on excess keys picked up in, for example, a Humble Bundle, but they're also open to less-scrupulous behavior. Kinguin is a ' key reseller (opens in new tab),' which is essentially a digital marketplace where anyone can sell game keys.

Frostpunk 2 announcement