"Global Soccer: A Management Game 2018" is an incredibly weak Football Manager ripoff where you look at a spreadsheet with some sportsball players on it and pretend you're managing teams. This is a really weak "me-too" entry in an already oversaturated genre of sports management games. As a paid product, it wasn't very successful so they made it "free". And still nobody really wanted it.
What do you do in the game? Stare at spreadsheets. It's every bit as boring as you could imagine. Oh and the UI sucks. And there's no audio, no music, nothing. A cheering crowd sample every now and then wouldn't hurt, but nope.
For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static text/images... it might as well be a web page. It's functionally no different from a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC.
The graphics aren't great, basically just a spreadsheet but with a bad UI. That's understandably a turn off for a lot of gamers, and it's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise. You deserve better than compromises.
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.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $9 USD for this.
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.
Even as a free game, this couldn't find an audience. With a peak of [b]only 10 players[/b], it's clear the Steam community took one look and walked away. They literally couldn't pay people to spend time playing this.
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?
Nope. This isn't worth downloading. There's no financial cost up-front, but you'd still be spending your time and a little hard drive space on a product that's far from the best. There's thousands of better alternatives on Steam.
