[quote][b]Note: Dead PvP game[/b]
This game contains no meaningful single player content. There are no available servers and no player population. This game cannot be played as intended.[/quote]
This was intended to be a cartoon-style, party game designed for local and online multiplayer. Players (if there were any) participate in an annual ghost hunter contest, which involves basic top down running around "action" multiplayer gameplay. Not to be confused with Ghosthunter(tm), the 2004 PS2 game from Cambridge Studio, this is abandoned Early Access Chinese mobile app stuff that never made it to the app stores. Yet it lingers here on Steam, dead and unfinished..
Also it doesn't seem to launch properly so even if you could find someone and threaten them sufficiently to force them to play this, you probably couldn't anyway.
So, "GhostHunter" is a dead PvP game. Why did it fail? It's video game autopsy time!
[i]Almost every PvP exclusive game on Steam fails.[/i] Only a tiny proportion of them "go viral". This game failed for many of the same reasons those others fail. The chief of which is the developer thinking that their game will "go viral" without actually creating any reason for it do so.
Competition amongst PvP centric games is extreme, and there's only a finite player base to appeal to. This game failed to reach any kind of critical mass and died as a result. Let's go into some of the reasons this particular game failed to appeal to gamers, despite the zero up front cost.
First and foremost, there's no meaningful single player content. The developer gambled that other players would be an acceptable substitute for adding storytelling, level design etc to the Game. They lost that bet.
Without a huge community of players or single player content to add a lasting value to the game, the game dies.
Developers must learn that other players are not an acceptable substitute for adding content to a game.
The developers abandoned this 3 years and 7 months ago. It will never be completed. This unfinished game is just polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuinely, completely made games.
While I couldn't find this on the mobile app stores, everything about it looks and feels like it's a mobile app designed for mobile phones... for PC gaming enthusiasts, it's not going to give you a cutting edge PC gaming experience. That alone is enough to disqualify this from any recommendation. We don't spend thousands building gaming rigs so that we can pretend they're iPhones and play iPhone games and mobile apps.
I'm not sure if this is an asset flip, but it's one of those cases where the assets just look much better than the rest of the quality of the game... a glaring inconsistency. There's no evidence, but as always, the biggest problem with asset flips besides the plagiarism is the deplorably low quality of the other aspects of the game, and even if the game assets are genuinely created for the game, the quality of the rest of the game is indistinguishable from that of asset flips.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
So this is "free", but it's abandoned. Worse, it was never intended to be free. The developer intended to charge for this if it ever left Early Access... but the developer just couldn't be bothered. Making this abandoned pollution that gamers need to filter through when searching for products made by more ethical developers who fulfill their promise to deliver on their Early Access commitment instead of breaking that promise.
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 11 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Since free games don't contribute to your game collector badge and other profile stuff, is this a worthwhile addition to your Steam library?
Definitely not. This isn't worth it. I'm paraphrasing another reviewer here, but this should be a paid product... they'd have to pay people to download it.
