"FINSummerVR" is a student project that has been published on Steam Direct. It's from Kajaani University of Applied Sciences in Finland. This is an academic exercise, not a professional game. While it has more quality than most amateur games, it is not a complete gaming experience. Student projects have limited value for gamers because they're not fully developed games, just barely functional demos that show the students progress.
Steam is not a place for for-profit colleges to dump student homework assignments... and having thousands of these is not good for gamers.
The students made a pointless little VR tech demo featuring a bunch of Finnish lawn games (mostly variations of throwing things at other things during the month long Finnish summer). It's poorly made, full of bugs, and of course abandoned and unmaintained because it's a student project.
However, problematically, the students were trying to charge MONEY for their homework assignment. That's seriously NOT OKAY.
In terms of visuals, this features fairly low quality low poly 3D graphics which will deter a lot of gamers, understandably. Gaming is a visual medium, and while some developers struggle with creating high quality visuals, failing to do so is a disservice to gamers. It's very difficult to recommend bad looking games.
It's VR exclusive, and that shows the developer failed to understand the most basic axiom of VR game design... if the only cool thing about your product is VR support, your product is not cool.
This game is fairly dated at 8 years old... and even back then it looked old and busted compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked bad then, it looks worse now.
Let's talk about pricing and the actual value this has for gamers.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $10 USD for this.... charging money for their school project! Totally unacceptable, and unethical.
Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It seems like a nice gesture for the game to have no up-front cost anymore, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded.
A peak of [b]2 concurrent players[/b] (according to SteamDB) for a "free" game is a disastrous public reception. Out of 130 million potential players here on Steam, almost nobody was interested. Even though this is "free". That level of rejection speaks a lot for the quality of the game.
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? What's the verdict?
Definitely not. No up front price, but I still feel ripped off.
