An 18-year-old New Hampshire developer, Michael Major, released a deliberately low-effort Steam game called This Game Costs 200 Dollars, priced at the platform's maximum allowed price as a joke. Months later he discovered it had generated $1.3 million (£1m) in sales, only to find that almost all of the purchases were being refunded, mostly by buyers in China, leaving him with a fraction of the windfall.

The game, a sequel to an earlier title called This Game Costs 10 Dollars, is an unpolished, asset-flipped experience with little actual content. Of its 6,717 sales, 6,707 were refunded, with 6,705 of those coming from China, where buyers appeared to purchase and instantly return the game without opening it, possibly to farm some form of points or ranking. Major, who has heard of similar tactics being linked to money laundering, has no definitive explanation and is left with just over $2,000, assuming no further refunds occur.