"Netherspace" is a very poorly made retro 2D shmup/Galaga ripoff (imagine making a game that somehow looks worse than Galaga, but in 2021). There's some ship upgrades and bossfights, but the graphics here were so bad that gamers never bothered to even touch it. Failing right out of the gate. When will amateur developers learn that gaming is a visual medium?
So this looks like an old 1990's Adobe Flash game that you might play in a web browser, and the problem there is obviously Steam wasn't intended to try compete with Chrome and Firefox. If it can be done in a web browser, it's not even close to a cutting edge PC gaming experience. That's a problem.
The graphics here are particularly awful, incredibly lazy, phoned in pixelcrap that probably took no more than 2 hours to make, so bad that it actually stands out as one of the worst looking games on Steam. Quite an accomplishment.
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.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $6 USD for this. Talk about delusions of grandeur. If amateur developers want to get paid the same kind of money as real developers, they need to at least learn how to do graphics properly.
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. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded.
In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at [b]only 2 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
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? What's the verdict?
This is a hard pass. There's no immediate financial commitment, but there are thousands of more compelling games on the platform that will give you a lot more enjoyment for your time.
