Steam users are questioning the legitimacy of a $1,000 game that basically has no gameplay, and are wondering how it made its way onto Valve’s platform in the first place.

Congratulations On Your Purchase describes itself as the most expensive game on Steam, and admits the experience only lasts 10 minutes. You walk a red carpet then leave your name on a wall, which is visible to every player who comes after you. The $999.99 price, the Steam description insists, “is not a mistake. It is the point.”

The Steam store page for Congratulations On Your Purchase is riddled with errors and was either deliberately or mistakenly formatted incorrectly (“You paid for this.<br><br>Not accidentally. Not on impulse. You saw the price. You read the description. And then you bought it anyway.<br><br>Welcome.<br><br>”) The developer is listed as “Minimum Viable Prestige,” and the publisher is called “Worth It Studio.” Neither has any other game on Steam. The AI disclosure admits generative AI was used to create the store page artwork, but insists the game does not use or generate AI content.

There is an official website for Congratulations On Your Purchase, which includes the aforementioned wall. There are three signatures on it, one of which is a slur. If we are to believe the game works in the way the Steam store description says it does, then these signatures represent people who actually paid for the game and wrote their name on the wall, although I can’t imagine anyone wouldn’t seek a refund immediately after.

“There is no combat. There are no enemies,” the store page continues. “There are no quests, no skill trees, no loot boxes — well, there is one box, but it contains only the feeling of having arrived somewhere important. You will walk. You will look. You will leave something behind. That is all. That is everything.”

There’s even a note on “value.”

“The question of whether this experience is worth $999.99 is, philosophically speaking, unanswerable. Worth is constructed. Price is arbitrary. The fact that you are reading this suggests you are already considering it — which means the answer, for you, may already be yes. We respect that about you. Congratulations, again, on your purchase.<br>Or your consideration of your purchase. Either way — welcome.”

And that’s it. The Steam forum for the game is filled with people calling it a scam and saying Valve shouldn’t allow it on the store. “Scam to exploit money from people,” one person said. “Not a game, on the same par as Air Control 2014. That was removed as should this. Flagged for Fraud.”

"I thought scams were prohibited on Steam lmao," another added. "I guess its a good IQ test, if someone has it, they shouldn't be even legally allowed to drive."

Some are taking issue with calling Congratulations On Your Purchase a scam because it's up front about what it is and what it's charging.

"I mean it isn't a scam though?" one Steam user said. "It is a highly inadvisable purchase but at the end of the day you can sell a pile of garbage for a million dollars it doesn't mean that anyone would be stupid enough to buy it but nothing against it is a scam as long as you communicate that it is a piece of trash and isn't something that it isn't." Others are making a joke of it, asking when it will be in a Steam sale.

There are currently no Steam user reviews for Congratulations On Your Purchase, and SteamDB shows it has zero current players. It’s unclear what Valve will do here. Will it pull the game from Steam? The game launched on May 28, so it’s nearly a month old. But it’s currently marked as “Steam is learning about this game,” which means it’s not currently eligible to appear in certain showcases on your Steam profile, nor does it contribute to global Achievement or game collector counts. So perhaps it’s not long for this world.

Valve has always employed a laissez-faire attitude to the Steam store, letting its policies, processes, and the community do the bulk of the curation work. It’s come under fire multiple times over the years for allowing questionable “games” on its platform. Sometimes Valve removes them, sometimes it doesn’t. It rarely comments publicly on its decisions.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.