N1L (No1Lives)

N1L (No One Lives) (Not to be confused with the old successful and popular AAA No One Lives Forever) was an attempt at making a PvP only third person zombie survival shooter (aka lame ripoff of 7 Days 2 Die only much much worse, tragically so). It's deep in development hell with no clear credible sign of coming to completion. It failed. SteamDB shows the game maxed out at only 3 concurrent players, which is a pitiful number, and now the game has practically no players, with nobody logging on for weeks at a time, and when someone does it's only very briefly, presumably just to see what it is then delete it. Why did it fail? It's video game autopsy time! First up the game visuals are terrible, everything looks asset flipped. There's no way to customise your character that I could see, and the overall quality here is woeful. Even with the graphics settings cranked it looks like an Unreal tutorial with too much glare and fuzziness due to mismanaging basic filters and post-processing. The gameplay is on par with the poor visuals... you need to start your own server of course, nobody plays this, and when you do you'll see it's a buggy, clunky unfinished mess. At this late, near abandoned state of development, it seems like a pre-alpha, and is nowhere near ready for Early Access. PvP gamers have literally thousands of games to choose from, hundreds of AAA games that are either free or cost next to nothing. Games have to actually offer something if they want to compete for players time. Part of the reason for the game failing was questionable ethics on behalf of the developer, with a credible account that the developer used a false DMCA claim to take down a (justified) negative review in an attempt to silence and intimidate gamers. And when you have a PvP only game that relies 100% on the goodwill of the gaming community, this is effectively brand suicide. The developers made the terrible mistake of launching a multiplayer only game in Early Access. This is almost certain to kill the game. Most gamers will evaluate a game only once. If they do so when the game is incomplete, they will check it out, then abandon it (just like the developers did). When (IF) the game eventually does get around to release, there will be no players, because the developers burned the first impressions through their faulty Early Access experience. Players who saw the game and didn't like it because it was incomplete [i]do not come back[/i]. Multiplayer games must have a large population if they are to go "viral" and succeed, especially without single player content to fall back on. Releasing a multiplayer only game into early access kills the game population, and thus the game, before the game even launches. The developers made the fatal, lazy mistake of believing that PvP, other players, would be an acceptable substitute for doing the difficult job of adding single player level design, storytelling, NPCs and other rich aspects of designed game content to the game. As a result of this choice by the developers, the game has little to no actual interactive game content. It's a little considered fact that the vast majority of PvP only, multiplayer only games [b]fail[/b]. Developers must learn that other players are not an acceptable substitute for doing the job of game developers and building a game filled with content. PvP only games must have a [b]huge[/b] player base for them to "go viral" and succeed. But with no single player experience to add lasting value to a game, the developers instead chose to bet against all odds that their game would "go viral" without any actual reason for players to want to play the game. Predictably, they lost this bet.