It’s not often that a video game straight up disappears without an explanation, but that’s the case with Cooking Mama: Cookstar. That in itself would be strange enough, but if the latest word on the street is to be believed, it gets even stranger, because it’s possible that the latest entry in the inoffensive cooking sim series may have been secretly doubling as a cryptocurrency mining system.

It can’t be stressed hard enough that this is just hearsay at the moment, but it’s also clear that the whole situation revolving around this game has been pretty strange. As IGN reported earlier this week, Cooking Mama: Cookstar was supposed to be released on March 26, but was removed after only a few hours on the Nintendo Switch eShop. This then led to Nintendo removing all traces of the game from its digital storefront, all while the official Cooking Mama Twitter and publisher Planet Digital remained silent on the matter.

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As strange as the jump in logic from “game disappearing” to “cryptocurrency” is, it’s a possibility that people have been wondering about for months. When Cookstar (then known as Cooking Mama: Coming Home to Mama) was first revealed, people were confused over official marketing hyping the incorporation of blockchain technology, the kind used for cryptocurrency, which would supposedly provide each copy of the game with its own unique ID that would allow for improved DRM and slight gameplay differences between individual copies.

But according to a PSA making the rounds on Twitter, it looks like the game’s blockchain technology was also being used to secretly access players’ Switch systems and use them to generate (or “mine”) cryptocurrency, potentially accessing players’ personal information on top of causing their consoles to suffer from overheating and reduced battery life. What’s more, it claims that Planet Digital was completely unaware that this was even happening.

Again, all of this is unconfirmed, but with the odd circumstances of Cooking Mama: Cookstar's removal, plus its previous fascination with blockchain, the possibility of it being the unwitting host of a crypto scam doesn’t actually seem too far-fetched.

At any rate, it may be a good idea for anyone who has Cookstar to delete it from their system until an official statement is released, just to be safe. Still, that’ll be tough news for those who were looking forward to the first Cooking Mama game with a “vegetarian mode.”

Cooking Mama: Cookstar was available for the Switch.

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