Back 4 More

[quote][b]Note: Dead PvP game[/b] This game contains no meaningful single player content. There are no available servers and no player population. This game cannot be played as intended.[/quote] This tech demo/concept involves turn based survival crafting as the players, all skeletons apparently (hopefully not asset flipped) collect, build, brawl, and quit, because you can't do any of that against other teams when there's no other teams. So, "Back 4 More" is a dead PvP game. Why did it fail? It's video game autopsy time! [i]Almost every PvP exclusive game on Steam fails.[/i] Only a tiny proportion of them "go viral". This game failed for many of the same reasons those others fail. The chief of which is the developer thinking that their game will "go viral" without actually creating any reason for it do so. Competition amongst PvP centric games is extreme, and there's only a finite player base to appeal to. This game failed to reach any kind of critical mass and died as a result. Let's go into some of the reasons this particular game failed to appeal to gamers, despite the zero up front cost. First and foremost, there's no meaningful single player content. The developer gambled that other players would be an acceptable substitute for adding storytelling, level design etc to the Game. They lost that bet. Without a huge community of players or single player content to add a lasting value to the game, the game dies. Developers must learn that other players are not an acceptable substitute for adding content to a game. It also doesn't help that the matchmaking requires absolute symmetry... and given that now, the other teams always have a player count of zero, this does not work well at all. The game is really simple and unambitious in terms of implementation, more of a tech demo or one of those cases where an amateur developer spends $100 to publish something on Steam Direct to see if it's possible. Yes, obviously it's possible. A proof of concept, tech demo, or something that's less than a little blip on the radar isn't offering anything truly valuable to gamers. The blurb on the sales page reveals what becomes very apparent when you try to play... this was a tech demo done by a developer for his own sake just to see if it was possible for him to spend $100 on Steam Direct. Well, that question is now answered, so we don't need to see any more of these self-indulgent "is it possible???" tech demos on Steam, right? Haha, of course not, there's 10 "Free" games published every day on Steam and around 50 games total. EVERY DAY. This is not one of the best of those. In terms of visuals, this features fairly low quality low poly 3D graphics which will deter a lot of gamers, understandably. Gaming is a visual medium, and while some developers struggle with creating high quality visuals, failing to do so is a disservice to gamers. It's very difficult to recommend bad looking games. On pricing, this is "free" enough, at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 4 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? Nope. This isn't worth downloading. There's no financial cost up-front, but you'd still be spending your time and a little hard drive space on a product that's far from the best. There's thousands of better alternatives on Steam.