Last Mortem

⠀

Simple yet very effective; charming early 2000s style fun. Love the bot support especially. Something most games lack these days.

[quote][b]Warning: Third Party Account[/b] This game requires you to create a third party "PlayFab" account... there's no valid reason for this in a PC game when SteamWorks is available. This is often done to harvest private data and profile you, with potential sale and transmission of your private data to third parties. The developers will probably argue that you can trust them, but if they were trustworthy they wouldn't demand you create a third party account. This represents a considerable risk to gamers due to the privacy and security implications of developers that wish to bypass Steam and harvest user data. Remember, sometimes if the product is free, YOU are the product.[/quote] [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] It's remarkable just how many amateur developers seem to think they'll make themselves rich and famous by dumping a whole bunch of Unity or Unreal assets onto a first person shooter multiplayer game template and then handing GabeN $100 through Steam Direct. Certainly the number is well into the thousands... and we have to question what all these abandoned asset flips on Steam are doing in terms of making gaming better for the average punter. The answer, of course, is nothing. So, Last Mortem 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 game graphics look better than you might expect, but that's just because it looks like some or all of them are "borrowed" from asset stores or wherever. Gamers can tell... and it comes across as insincere. There's also the old adage that those who lack the budget and talent to make their own game assets usually lack the budget and talent to do the rest of the job of game development properly, too. You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality product, this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me. This is "free" enough, at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, 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? Nope. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.