I've been watching the development for this game for a while now, and I've wanted to try out the gameplay, but not one person was in the game. I'm not going to pay for a game to sit and wait for a lobby to open.
Deathmark requires at least 4 players to start a game, and from what I've seen from the gameplay, it's not all that impressive, and that might be the reason there were no lobbies, and with the minimum player count being 4, that means you need a full friend group or randoms just to get started, which is a huge barrier currently, and I refunded the game without getting into a single game.
The developers banked on the fact that people from Rec Room would buy and play this, but very few people came to even play, whether that be platform difference, or just not enough interest about a game outside of RR.
There is also no marketing outside of this either, and even with 800 people in their discord server, this game had an all time peak of 28 players, and at the time of writing this, has zero active players.
There is also an achievement for launching the game (not playing a game, LAUNCHING it), and only 38% of players, at the time of writing this, have got that achievement.
A lot of the features that were promised initially ended up getting postponed or not even delivered and it just feels like a demo rather than a game right now, and I understand how early access games work, but this game was released in a market of an already over saturated genre, so releasing it in an early access phase with nothing really unique in a market of already completed games was a bad decision to me.
I also think the devs should’ve gone the crowdfunding route if they were really pressed for money, a game like UNBEATABLE did that, and got over $300,000, and built a community way before launch, and a game like Deathmark heavily depends on that kind of player base, which it currently doesn’t have.
Something that really annoyed me was seeing the Lead Director publicly state multiple times that there wasn't enough time to work on the game, while seeing their discord activity state they were playing games for multiple hours in the day, sometimes for more than 12 hours at a time. I'm not saying developers can't take breaks, but telling your community you don't have time while your PUBLIC discord status says you’re playing games more than you seemingly work on it is not a great trust factor for me.
This game had labor put into it, I can tell, game dev is hard, but in its current state, I can’t recommend this game to people, even if it is on sale, and in their announcements, this game plans to go up in price (above the $5 mark), but I would be shocked if this game does that due to how unfinished it currently is.
