Battle Babes

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"Battle Babes" is a really mediocre "me too" card battler game that you're expected to spend a lot of money on DLC for. Amazingly this was kickstarted, but it seems like nobody who backed it bothered to play it (try to keep a straight face when you see the SteamdB player counts, this was a disaster). I guess part of the reason this failed so badly is because it looks like a mobile app, it's not truly free, and it's trying to compete with far better games (Hearthstone, MTG Arena etc) while offering far less. This is only free in a rudimentary sense... You don't get the full game, you have to spend an eye watering amount of money on DLC (FIFTY UNITED STATES DOLLARS) if you want the complete thing. The developer set out to mislead gamers by suggesting this is free when it's not... predatory and nasty monetization we expect from trashy mobile devs, and this kind of thing has no place on Steam. Even though this is misleadingly advertised as "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 3 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. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off. [quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says: [quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote] The developer admits they didn't hire a team of talented staff to produce the game and tried to do the whole thing on their own, instead. This is a lot like boarding an airplane, and halfway through the flight, having the pilot come out and serve peanuts. It's going to end in disaster. It requires a team of competent people to do a complex job properly, and that's not what has happened here... another explanation for the poor quality of this game, and almost certainly a key contributor to its failure. The developer bizarrely breaches Valve guidelines to squabble about prices. This seems to be done in an attempt to mislead gamers from the facts of my review. You can see the prices in the store yourself. Indeed, the developer is trying to scam gamers into buying the same content more than once by overlapping the DLC content... this is unethical and shady. That the developer seeks to mislead gamers about this fact is disturbing, especially when the numbers are there for all to see. The developer misrepresents their attempt to cash in on this game by suggesting that when he deliberately made a bunch of DLC for the game, he didn't expect anyone would ever buy it at all. That's clearly complete BS. [i]When people put things up for sale, they do so with the expectation they will sell.[/i] It's unclear why the developer is going through such mental contortions to try hide the fact he expects people to buy the DLC for this? The developer then tells a complete lie... that my review is not factually correct, however, nothing in their response counters any of the solid facts of my review. More mental contortions and dishonesty. The developer comes up with a complete BS story that "indie games often have fluctuating numbers", and this is utter bullcrap because the SteamDB data shows the [b]maximum[/b] player count. This is actually generous, because if we take trends and fluctuation into account and look at the SteamDB series data instead of the recorded maximum, this game on average has ZERO players at any given time. It's overwhelmingly rejected by over ONE HUNDRED MILLION gamers on Steam. You can see the sheer BS from this failed developer. It explains the failure of this game and the terrible quality, but does not excuse it. Such a pathetic and disingenuous attempt to argue with the hard facts about the games true popularity (none) is just another dishonest representation from this failed developer. Dishonesty and misleading gamers is unethical, but the developer's bizarre response makes it blatantly clear now this is what they are doing. Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this game to anyone.