Every now and then I like to look up Rocket League Sideswipe on youtube to see what people are up to. Sometimes you find highlight reels, people claiming their quad reset was the first in the world even though its August and its been basically a day 1 mechanic, and maybe you might even find some surprisingly entertaining content, like Mobile Gamer, who while having the most generic name I've ever seen, has been the most consistent and entertaining content creator I have found making regular RLSS content. However, more often than not, you're going to find yourself a wasteland of "How to download" tutorials. While there is nothing necessarily wrong with this especially if the guides are clear and easy to follow, more often than not they are just downright lies.

The Plague

One of the biggest plagues to cover this game so far is the number of bots on YouTube reposting the same fake videos trying to convince you that the game can be downloaded on iOS devices. Before I continue I just want to make this extremely clear… Rocket League Sideswipe is only currently avaliable for Android. As soon as you see iOS in a video description, you might as well dislike the video and report the channel because I can guarantee you it is fake. The two devices I have made tutorials on are Android phones and computers using Bluestacks, which emulates Android. The reason? These are the only ways you can actually play the game at the moment. At no point did Psyonix release an iOS version of the game, so why would it be possible to play the game on it?

As of writing this there is no information out yet about Beta so I cannot say if iOS will be supported, but I am expecting that it will. If not, the proper release of the game definitely will, as Psyonix isn't going to ignore 20% of the global smart phone market, no matter how big a lawsuit their parent company is currently in with Apple. For now, people with iPhones and other iOS devices will need to wait. If you have a computer, you can always get the game running on there, but you won't be able to play the Alpha build of the game on your mobile.

A Typical Scam Video

So let's say you are unfortunate enough to have clicked on one of these videos, we might as well have a bit of a look to see what they end up saying! For this, I'm watching the first video shown from the image above. I would send a link, but I am fairly sure all these videos will be taken down at some point, as this has happened before with other links, particularly the duplicate videos.

Part 1: The Bait

When the video starts, they'll show them using an iPhone "playing" the game. Different videos go to different extents to make this realistic. Some will splice in some footage they found on YouTube (one video I saw left in the loaded home screen and with the username I found the original footage), some will pretend to be playing the game while showing a video of gameplay (as you can tell by the movement being super early/late to their finger movement), and some will just straight up not show any gameplay whatsoever and just show the app icon on their homescreen. The funniest part about this option is they almost always have the wrong name and icon to the app, so people who actually have the game know instantly its fake, but unfortunately this doesn't help those legitimately watching the video hoping to download on their device.

In the case of this video, the creator did something different however. They took the Alpha trailer and paused it just before the countdown and added some text to the video saying "PRESS TO START". Of course they never clicked because that would give away the illusion. Not only does this completely skip logging in, the actual load screen, the menu to join a game, and so on, it also have the ESRB rating in the bottom left corner, which would be very odd if it were actually there in the real game!

Part 2: The Suspicious Site

Once they've dazzled their audience, the magician moves onto their second act. They give you a URL to head to, which takes you to a page that looks like an app store, with various apps and games to download, RLSS obviously being one of them listed. Taking the time to look at various videos, these pages often look basically the exact same, and always have obvious fakes listed like GTA6 - talk about red flags.

Once RLSS is found, they then click Download which takes them through a loading screen with techno-babble, such as my personal favourite from this video "start injection to sistem," and I honestly wonder how someone can mess up that badly making a site like this, but that's besides the point. (Can we also appreciate the circle's 81% being almost completely filled!)

Part 3: The Offloading

Of course at this point you might be wondering why videos like this exist in the first place? What could possibly bring someone to choose to create a scam like this? Well this is why. In classic mobile scam fashion, the tutorial finishes with you being offloaded to the App Store to download and play a couple games. These developers have obviously paid for their apps to be listed to inflate their download count and hopefully get a few people to actually enjoy the game and continue playing. This type of scam has existed as long as smart phones have been popular, but its a real shock how many people still fall for it.

As far as I am aware, there is no way they can download a virus or anything like that, at least in the way this tutorial works (I have seen ones make you disable the antitrust to third party downloads and such which are especially dangerous) but they still get what they were after, a couple downloads on some crappy mobile games, and a bit of money in their pocket. Take this with a grain of salt as I am no expert, and always be cautious downloading things from the internet.

Part 4: The Confirmation

With the video nearly finished, the creator once-again opens the game to show "it is definitely working" but once again opts not not show any actual gameplay, because how could they? They haven't got the actual game! Anyone who doesn't know any better would watch this video and think its legit and give it a go, and even some who don't think it will work will still try, because of somethingk known as confirmation bias.

People like it when stuff agrees with their opinion. When someone is trying to get RLSS on their iOS device, they will often ignore people saying it can't be done, because they don't want that to be true. As a result, videos like these with thousands of viewers (a large amount probably botted as you always see the comments filled with bots as well) but still a handful of people actually falling for the scam, and I find that really unfortunate.

Conclusion

I have created this post to try and bring awareness to this and hopefully make less people fall for it. If you are a part of a group that is interested in the game, please consider sharing this to them to make sure everyone can hear about this. Even just mentioning that "the game is not downloadable on iOS full stop" would be awesome and is what I hope you will consider doing.

Remember, be safe out there. I'll say it one more time just to make it absolutely clear what I am trying to say… Rocket League Sideswipe Alpha is not available on iOS devices. If you want to see my guides on installing the game on PC or an Android device, you can click here.

If you're reading this, I just want to say thank you! Most people probably won't reach this low in the post so you're one of the special ones! I sincerely hope you enjoy playing the game when it releases and are as exited as I am, so see you out on S.C. Field soon.

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