Indie Dev Story

"Indie Dev Story" is a badly made kind of tycoon/life RPG where you take on the role of an amateur developer and try to make money by shoving garbage onto Steam Direct at $100 a pop. The premise is inaccurate because it implies the developer had a software development job and quit it to make garbage games for profit, but from my experience the majority of Steam Direct amateur developers would never qualify for a real game development job. Anyway this is a badly made take on what could have been an almost tolerable game, it's unpolished and the UI is downright janky, it's tedious to play and unengaging. It's also another one of those cases where no research was done prior. Steam has dozens of better software development tycoon games, some of them professionally developed. Gameplay consists of maintaining a couple of stats along the tycoon loop, socializing, sleeping etc, these are all tedious sub-games that detract rather than enhance the already poor main game loop. The "game" here is of a pretty low technical standard. The implementation is basic minimum effort stuff, more like a weekend project rather than a serious, professionally made product... and it's bad even compared to most amateur made games. An experimental piece... and the experiment is "Can I spend $100 on Steam Direct and then call myself a game dev?" While that $100 spend on Steam Direct probably made the developers feel good about themselves, we have to ask why this kind of thing is good for gamers. It isn't. This features lazy low-polygon voxel "Minecraft"-like "art", making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the 1990s. A lot of amateur developers see Minecraft's success and assume it's because it looks bad, not because it had unique and appealing game mechanics, and they try to emulate the success without understanding it. It also happens to be easy, and doesn't need any proper talent in terms of game development/graphic artists etc. That's why reviewers are faced with so many of these terrible games with confrontingly bad graphics. Developers must learn that Minecraft succeeded despite the bad graphics, not because of them. Let's talk about price and the value this represents for us gamers. They have their hand out for a $3 USD "donation" for this as you're expected to give them money from buying empty DLC from Steam... digital panhandling. Like the homeless guys who splash dirty water on your windscreen at the traffic lights. No thanks. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at [b]only 13 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. This "free" game won't count toward your game collection count on your profile. With that in mind, is it something you should still download? I can't recommend this. It may not be the worst thing on Steam but it's far from the best, and PC gamers have far better options for spending their time. Finally, I write these reviews to try help people navigate the thousands of games on Steam so they don't waste time on low quality products. There's over 140,000 games on Steam... Steam Direct is allowing an influx of around 40-50 new games [i]every day![/i]. If you think I'm wrong about this one, go ahead and add it to your library, download it, install it, play it and see for yourself. Maybe you'll come to agree with me after wasting your time. Either way, consider writing your own reviews too. I'm just glad if my review helps give gamers enough info to make a better informed choice.