Dream Pets VR is a case of an unethical developer abusing Valve's Early Access program. It's a very short, simple, dumbed down VR exclusive experience where you customise one of three dogs, then jump to a frisbee mini game. That's all there is to this, maybe 1-2 minutes of gameplay at most.
The game was abandoned one month after launch and hasn't been updated in around 6 years. It blew past the developers commitment to complete the game without any notification or admission of failure from the developer.
This seems to have been made a VR exclusive to prevent any comparison with non-VR 3D games, a comparison that this game would fail very badly at. Developers must learn that while VR is great, if the only thing that makes the game great is the VR, then the game isn't great at all.
The poor quality of this game is reflected in the general public reception. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 9 players. That's right, only 9. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in the game is to be expected. Gamers just didn't take this low quality game seriously, and for good reason.
Unethically, the developer sold keys to this abandoned Early Access game into cheap, nasty game bundles, where they knew it would be advertised and sold as a complete game. This seems to have been done in an attempt to mislead gamers into buying a knowingly faulty, defective and incomplete product. When a developer does this for a game they have zero practical intention of completing, this is essentially a scam, an intention to get paid for a broken/unfinished product. Often this is done as an exit strategy, as the developer takes the money and runs. No refunds have been given, the developer kept all the money they took from gamers.
Furthering the unethical nature of this developer, while they are selling this incomplete game under Valve's failed Early Access program, they're abusing that program, and not working on this game full time, as they have other projects in the works. That means there's ZERO confidence anyone who buys this in Early Access will receive a complete game, and it's possible that they're being scammed.
Dream Pets VR has the scam price of around $5 USD (for an incomplete, 2 minute long minigame), it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the unethical nature of the developer. Remember that if you buy a game from an unethical developer, you're putting your money at risk.
