CETERIS Paribus

[quote][b][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_flip]Warning: Asset Flip![/url][/b] "CETERIS Paribus" is one of literally thousands of creatively bankrupt Digital Homicide style asset flips infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere.[/quote] The developer took a medieval castle asset from the Unreal Marketplace and a bunch of Synty Studios Poly asset pack characters and mangled them into a godawfully bad economics quiz game that might as well have been a web page. This is the kind of minimum viable product Digital Homicide were so popular for, pumping out asset flips every week until people pointed out what they were doing and they tried to sue reviewers, Jim Sterling and Valve. Worked out well for them didn't it? Nope. As usual with "educational" games, this isn't making education better, but it is making gaming worse. What have the kids learned today? That it's economical to steal the work of others and put your own name on it because this is cheaper and easier than doing the work yourself (Adam Smith would be so proud of this exercise in marginalising input prices, lowering labour costs and manufacturing efficiency) and that plagiarism is okay if you're making an educational game, so go for it kids, put your name on other people's game assets. Nobody will ever know! (cough, we know, cough). So, "CETERIS Paribus" is partially or completely made up of stock assets, "borrowed" from asset stores and free asset websites. Little, if anything in this game is the creation of the "developer". I wouldn't be surprised if the economics stuff was copied out of someone else's textbook, too. While there's no up front price for this asset flip, the other problem with asset flips is that when developers aren't capable of doing their job and creating high quality assets, it's also true they can't do any of the rest of the job of a game developer either. That's definitely true for "CETERIS Paribus", and this kind of asset flipping never results in games that have quality or value for PC gamers. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), 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. In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 12 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Given that this free title won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library? Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.