Goblin Summer Camp

[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 hide-and-seek meets StumbleGuys non-free PvP game failed extremely hard (although it did have a few people with very bad taste try to play it once). The low poly graphics look like they might be asset flipped and the monetisation came across as greedy and pointless, but I think at the end of the day it's just bad quality and pushing unfinished games with day 0 DLC that made gamers shun this. So, Goblin Summer Camp 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 4 years and 11 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. In terms of visuals, this features fairly low quality low poly 3D visuals 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. There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $8 USD for this. So they definitely had highly creative imaginations. 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. Even after that, this is only free in a rudimentary sense... the developer has their hand out for a whopping $15 cosmetics "donation" for this as you're expected to buy some extra DLC from Steam... digital panhandling. Like the homeless guys who splash dirty water on your windscreen at the traffic lights. No thanks. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at less than 100 concurrent players, they couldn't even break three figures, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it. 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? Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough. [quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says: [quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote] The developer apparently has no time to meet his promise to gamers to complete this game on the 30th April 2021 (oops, and it's still not finished!) But he does have [i]all the time in the world[/i] to comb through reviews and rage, rage, rage. The developer decides that instead of accepting his failure, he'll attack the messenger for pointing out the obvious. Why attack a reviewer like this? Anything at all to build the cognitive dissonance to pretend this didn't only have a handful of people try playing it. There's zero players of this game now. It's dead. For obvious reasons. And the reason I have friends is because I don't ask them to play trash like this. The developers breach of Valve guidelines stands as a sad testiment to human failure, as evidenced by this dead garbage. Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this game to anyone. One thing I did, however, omit in my review is that all the reviews for this trash are joke reviews, mocking the game for how incredibly bad it is. "This game cured my cancer, saved my marriage"... sarcastic, but not useful. Take the review score of this abandoned garbage with a grain of salt. Perhaps the developer doesn't deserve to be mocked as hard as he was by gamers here... I'll let you guys decide.