"Colony Simulator" an advertisement for an asset pack on the Unity asset store. Ugh. The advertisement works well enough, it's made by an actual developer unlike the people who continually spam Steam with flips of his assets. It does raise the question of whether these asset stores have helped great game development as intended, or instead, simply created a revenue stream propped by Russian asset flippers.
Having reviewed over 13,000 games on Steam now, my findings are that these assets have unintentionally caused far more harm than good, as genuine indie developers have to struggle and compete with advertisements like these as well as 1:1 asset flips, and the Digital Homicide style minimum viable product asset flip games that Jim Sterling ran afoul of.
So, on to this advertisement... it's just an asset pack, and while the ethics of flipping assets are a primary reason to avoid them, the fact of the matter is that game assets are intended to act as guides, educational tools and placeholders for developers making full games. This is NOT a complete game, because it is just one of those asset packs. I'd say the same thing about the products that will result from this when flipped by Russian asset flippers and plastered with fake reviews... because it's not a full, complete game, it has no value as a game for gamers.
Worse, this advertisement for an asset pack is polluting Steam. Genuine indie developers who've done the right thing and made complete games for gamers have to compete with this kind of junk to get marketplace visibility and an audience for their games. It makes it harder for gamers to find those genuinely made games. The asset creator here has deliberately gone out of his way to harm indie developers by dumping this asset pack onto Steam as an advertisement.
This features fairly low quality low poly 3D visuals which will deter a lot of gamers, understandably. In this case the assets are probably just placeholders intended to be replaced with real game assets by whoever buys this asset pack. But, not to put a fine point on it, Steam is not the Unity Asset Store!!!!! This has to be judged as if it was a completed product. This asset pack fails that judgement.
This is only free in the same way that adverts on Youtube and banner ads in your browser are. This is a game demo that's been dumped on Steam to advertise another Steam store page in the hopes of raking in some cash. Just because advertisements are free, doesn't mean they're worth your time.
Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at less than 100 concurrent players, they couldn't even break three figures, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it.
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.
