"MGDC Minigame Collection" is one of literally thousands of student projects infesting Steam. It's from Miami Game Design Club in Florida. While student projects tend to be better quality than most "amateur" made games, we must still question what value such projects have for gamers. As with all student projects, this isn't really a fully fleshed out game, it's just the result of an academic exercise, and as such it has much more limited value as a game than a professionally developed game would have.
Educational institutions should not be using Steam as a dumping ground for homework assignments (especially if the students didn't even pass the course). Sure, it helps their marketing and helps the students feel good about themselves, but this is another case of a business putting themselves before the needs of gamers.
This is a collection of a whopping 19 student minigames, all of which are terrible. And as we know, more of a bad thing doesn't make it better. There's a lot to unpack here, and of course it's important for students to learn to make complete games, this is commendable, but publishing them is not... it's like saying every junior high school kid should publish their English homework assignments in Reader's Digest. Inflicting this stuff on the general public is not part of the learning process.
The games are all valueless tech demos, to the point that things like the hacking minigame in Bioshock is a deeper, more fleshed out game. These are generally worse than the Flash games you might play on Newgrounds.
The graphics aren't great, ranging from low poly minimalist environments (these guys never heard of texture mapping, maybe that's next year's curriculum) to deplorably lazy 2D retro graphics in some of the games. 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.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
It would be unethical for students to try charge money for their homework assignments, so you don't have to pay any money for this. But you'd still have to spend your time downloading this, and "time is money", as they say.
There's the other problem, too... as a student project, this wasn't made for gamers. There's no requirement for them to polish and balance the game properly, all they need is something to show the faculty so they can get their grade and move on. Let's once more ask... why is that good for gamers?
It's obviously not delivering a solid product. Yet here it is, on the store page, and here you are, reading my review for a student demo that's going to waste your time. While genuine amateur developers who made real products get ignored because they have to compete with this stuff.
In some ways, this deluge of student projects on Steam is harmful to everyone.
The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak user count was only ONE person. That's right, only one person ever used this at a time. When I tried this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak user count for the product. OUCH.
The only user activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it.
Considering there's over 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality product is to be expected.
This student project/tech demo/glorified homework assignment provides no Steam profile benefits, no +1 to your game count, and little value to gamers (because it's just a small, unpolished student project), so I can't recommend this over the thousands of full, professionally made games on Steam.
