How it Started
Quite the loaded title, so let’s back up a bit. It all started with an email.
Actually, scratch that. It kinda didn’t.
Class Zero Seven came on my radar via an indie game content creator I can’t recall right now (sorry) long before this whole debacle. It was a 3D beat-em-up—a genre I’m very fond of, and a title that seems like it’ll scratch the same itch as “Uppers”, developed by Studio Tubanar and published by HypeTrain Digital.
I immediately followed the game on Steam/Twitter to keep up with its updates.
In 2024, the devs posted a call to localization professionals which piqued the interest of a lot of peers, so naturally, I applied. Arabic wasn’t listed, but it was part of the supported roster. Couldn’t hurt, right?
I didn’t expect much to come out of this, as that’s how it usually goes with cold outreach.
With how low the success rate for that type of outreach is, and the fact that Arabic wasn’t even listed to begin with, I was very surprised to hear them get back to me in 2025.
This was our entire chain of messages via email.
How it Went
So we moved on to Discord per the request of the dev and had a preliminary consultation chat regarding right-to-left implementation, a core feature to allowing games to be localized into Arabic.
So far, so good.
As confirmed by the chatlog above, now the implementation is up and running—which wasn’t the case before loclait and I got involved with the project.
One can argue about the value of this consultation—to be honest, it is in fact mostly basic info you could find with a couple of hours of research.
But the dev chose to ask an expert for help instead of researching the topic themselves and figuring out how to work with a language they don’t speak via trial and error, so regardless of how objectively easily accessible the info loclait provided was, they saw value in the convenience and ease of access to said info, and sought out a streamlined way to get it from a professional.
After the initial convo above, I circled back a while later regarding promoting the game in the region, something we offer to all of our partners/clients if interested, but necessitates announcing involvement in the localization pre-release.
Since Arabic was already announced and the demo was on the horizon, I’d assumed they’d accept. Instead, their response was:
Which, fair, their call. But it did strike me as a bit weird, especially the leadup to it.
That wouldn’t have been a red flag by itself—but when you’re constantly having talks that lead to nothing with prospects, you get a feel for if a potential project will pan out very early in the convo.
In my convo with Faqhrul Suria, the Project Lead at Studio Tubanar, I noted—as I’m sure you’ve felt from reading the few of their messages I shared—profound disinterest.
Extremely short offhand responses, no commitments, no dates/volumes, and periods of silence requiring follow ups. Like when someone wants something and they want this convo over and done with quick.
Despite what would usually be a huge red flag for me, I kept the convo going against my better judgement. Because this was genuinely something I was excited to be a part of.
In any case, the chat died down after, and I only circled back months later when I needed to confirm.
Like any good contractor, I informed this potential client—and multiple others who’ve recently got in touch—that we’re going to be busy, and asked for any info they could spare so we could anticipate their project and slot it in better during a relatively busy period.
(No, the named project wasn’t under NDA. I’m just leaving a developer I respect out of this mess.)
Crickets.
For 7 months, zero response—even after a follow-up.
So I assumed in good faith, like anyone would, that they’re busy. Though I still suspected that my original assessment was correct—that they got what they came for—so I left the server, and left it at that.
Fast forward 7 months, and the game’s socials are active again with new art, gameplay, and such.
Assuming the best of intentions due to that sudden uptick of activity making me believe they were just busy, I hopped back on their server to get in touch with my point of contact again, as I couldn’t DM them on discord—their preferred method of communication—without a shared server.
Since I saw that the dev was active in their server a few hours prior when I joined, and assuming further private communication would go nowhere if the last attempt was anything to go by, I took my chances and posted my message in the general chat where the dev was last active.
This was their response.
”Okay, this is weird”, I thought.
But maybe they were so busy they forgot we talked. It happens.
So I asked them to check the DM log you’ve been reading and the email they sent us to confirm.
Right about now, this is starting to tick me off.
But again, I kinda expected some level of, frankly, laziness from the dev looking at our prior convos. So I re-asked them to check our DMs and offered to share them here if that’s too much work for them.
Note that I went into this convo 90% expecting a “No, we’ve moved forward with another provider”.
Their publisher HypeTrain has their roster of multilingual language providers, and I’d suspected from the start that Studio Tubanar just wanted to get Arabic looking right for their existing contracted provider, and weren’t all that invested in collaborating—hence the disinterest.
How it Crashed
What followed sure was something.
Now, I’m sure you’re scratching your head at why this -assumedly grown ass adult- developer is acting like a teenage e-girl getting mad at the resident server pedo for trying to make her join his harem of kittens.
But I want you to suppress that thought for a minute and actually look at the response.
No attempt to address what I brought up. Instead, a nice “How the fuck are you here? This is awkward.”
But to answer that question, please scroll to the top, to their initial contact with me.
Notice something in the signature?
On a second thought, yeah, it is pretty awkward to accidentally confirm that you talked with a person and requested their services when you’ve spent the last 15 minutes gaslighting them about that exact fact. Oof.
Anyhow, since they kept actively avoiding to address my basic request and treating me like I’m insane, I took this as a sign that they’re fine with me bringing them the receipts in public as they couldn’t be bothered to check them themselves.
This was a little more than the “no” I bargained for, and I knew it wasn’t gonna end well at this point, but will that stop me? Hell no lmao.
How it Burned
And so,
I posted a pic of our initial thread and the first two Discord messages we had. Message deleted and my account timed out for two minutes.
Okay, no uploads. I posted the images to a private imgur album and reposted my message.
This time, it’s a different error. “Walls of text” and an 11 minute time out. It feels like someone is actively siccing this bot on me right now, but whatever.
Let’s try again. But before that, my Spidey sense told me to screenshot everything I sent so far—so I did.
At this point, the dev is asking me to switch to DMs—the thing I repeatedly asked them to check and they didn’t, or more likely, chose to act like they didn’t. So now I guess I’m not completely insane once the bot logged my deleted messages and it was confirmed I had receipts. Curious.
But whatever. I brought this up in public because messaging privately went nowhere. So let’s try again.
It was getting pretty late, so I took no chances and split the long message to three and obfuscated the imgur album link to avoid all the suspiciously convenient bot guardrails. And it worked!
For like a minute.
I was planning to leave in a bit regardless, but they swiftly banned me from the server before I could and completely deleted my messages nearly immediately.
Which wasn’t unexpected at this point, so I sent a nicely worded adieu to the dev and let them know they’ll star in the documentary you’re reading right now.
Which I think they didn’t take very well, as they blocked me right after.
Thankfully, a friend was still in the server to document the aftermath.
That last bit is especially ironic from the person who asked me to continue chatting about their project on Discord upon my first response. Real mature—but again, I expected nothing less.
I don’t want to assume, but I genuinely hope whoever is behind this project is a group of teenagers who could tolerate each other or something and not a mentally stunted adult managing other adults.
Because if they’re not, lord fucking help whoever has to work with them.
And if anyone at HypeTrain Digital ends up reading this, please, put your developers on a leash.
Whatever you might personally think of this type of behavior, as a publisher contracted with this developer and as the party likely paying for the localizations Class Zero Seven is getting, this behavior directly reflects on your image.
And legally, depending on the affected party’s country, their oddly scammy behavior could have serious ramifications on you too.
Why Name & Shame?
If you’ve been following me for long enough, you might have read about a worse case—one where a dev straight up took our unfinished work and used it in-game for free.
But even then, I didn’t name and shame. I shamed, but never gave out enough info to make them identifiable.
I almost never do that.
So why here, and why now?
For starters, it’s not because I’m mad about the free consultation. Note the word free.
Despite how much the preteens on that server were malding about me wanting to “scam” their deity, and like many of our clients and partners can attest to, what we provided for Studio Tubanar was a genuine gesture of goodwill we were never planning to charge for as part of our rendered services proper.
This, however, was not something I had the chance to tell Faqhrul Suria or Studio Tubanar about yet.
As far as the developer knows, a video game localization studio has taken time out of its busy schedule to render a professional paid service for Studio Tubanar per their request.
The Project Lead at Studio Tubanar, Faqhrul Suria, then proceeded to ghost them for 7 months, be rude to them, gaslight them, treat them like they’re a mental case for acting like they know them and did work for them and inquiring about if the project was moving forward or not despite MULTIPLE requests to check the Direct Messages between them to confirm, and further wasted their time when they brought that fact up—only then to nuke their entire message log on their Discord server and play victim in front of their impressionable fanbase once they were exposed.
Under any semblance of professionalism standards, this falls under actively acting with malice.
And yes indeed, it’s very scammy, and super scummy, behavior—and it’s sad to see that the leadership of a project I was so excited to play, and even more excited to be a part of, behaves like this.
But that’s not what I’m mad about.
Just taking advantage of someone doesn’t tick one off like doing that and being an asshole about it on top. If you’re going to scam, at least have the decency to be nice about it. If you don’t have class, have finesse.
Conclusion
The mask off moment usually has a narrative purpose, so it’s rather ironic that Faqhrul Suria revealed who they truly were for absolutely no reason since we never planned on charging them for that initial consultation.
But as the saying goes, when someone shows you who they are, believe them.
In a way, I’m glad that me and my business will now serve as a cautionary tale for those who come after, and with minimal losses on my end too because the perpetrator was too dumb to even scam right.
I genuinely didn’t come into this hoping for more than a closing “no” that would help me tick the project off my list of potential happenings that night.
Instead, somehow, that quick confirmation message escalated into them gaslighting me, mocking me, then into publicly labeling me as a “bully” and “scammer” out to keep the small guy down.
Mind you, said David runs a game development studio contracted with HypeTrain Digital, one of the biggest indie publishers around, and their twitter posts consistently get 200 retweets on average.
Their Goliath on the other hand is a small industry contractor they approached, gaslit, and—by all accounts—knowingly scammed, for simply wanting to confirm if the project they reached out about and were provided unpaid labor for was moving forward or not.
But alright, even if I wasn’t initially bullying Mr. Small, I admit that this post is me bullying Studio Tubanar.
Though going by their standards, it’s totally fair. I’m just punching up.
If there’s a takeaway from this whole situation, it’s this:
Freelancers, please never forget to document everything.
This is especially important not only for the unfortunate souls who applied alongside me to localize Class Zero Seven and might be working on it now or in the near future, but also for the developers, artists, and voice actors Studio Tubanar will soon hire in-house to help with development.
Nobody will protect you, receipts will—especially in a culture where this level of toxicity is tolerated.
*As of 09/04/2026, HypeTrain Digital was informed about this situation. No response was given.
By Seif Chaib.
Originally posted on Linkedin.