Night Project

[quote][b][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtransaction]Warning: In-Game Cash Shop[/url][/b] This game is infested with a toxic mobile app style cash shop. You will be prompted to and expected to give money/credit card details to the developers through this cash shop to buy in-game goods so you can play the game.[/quote] "Night Project" is is [b]not a complete game[/b]. It's an advertisement disguised as a full game when it isn't. You're expected to pay even more money through DLC just to unlock the actual content... yeah.. it's paywalled, NOT free. This is a shady way to market a for-profit product, and misleading gamers for profit is wrong. [i]Night Project[/i] is a very basic, toxically and misleadingly priced Unreal engine kitbash, and of course it's the lowest common denominator of "amateur" train wrecks on Steam, the first person horror jumpscare. But only part of it. , but you only get the full experience if you pay cash for DLC that removes the paywall. Instead of following the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos]Official Steamworks Process For Demos[/url], the developer decided to pollute Steam with for-profit advertising. Whether this is deliberate and malicious, or simply ignorance and incompetence, the result is deceptive marketing. This is bad for gamers and bad for genuine developers who do the right thing, because they have to compete for visibility against these misleading advertisements. That's not okay! The purpose of this advertisement is to get you to shell out a whopping $6 USD to unlock content needed for the full game, and I don't recommend you do that either. What do you do in the game? Well you can get jumpscared and deal with the janky, hamfisted bungling of the Unreal Engine in this kitbash, but not much, most of the "game" this is advertising is just orientated around the toxic cash shop and DLC you have to buy to play the whole thing. Which nobody wanted to do, check out the player data below. On the important matter of pricing and value for gamers, there's a lot going on here with monetisation, so this really shouldn't be considered a truly free product because of that. As an advertisement, this is only free in the same way that adverts on Youtube and banner ads in your browser are. This is a game demo that's been dumped on Steam to advertise another Steam store page in the hopes of raking in some cash. Just because advertisements are free, doesn't mean they're worth your time. It's important to understand there's a formal process to create a demo/page for a game which hasn't been followed here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos While it might seem like an innocuous mistake, publishing demos and advertisements as if they are full games is misleading and in some ways harmful. This advertisement is taking up marketing space and visibility that would be better made available to a developer that's done the right thing and created a full game. Instead, that visibility is given over to a demo/advert that's been published incorrectly and is polluting the marketplace. It's unclear if this mistake was made through incompetence or a deliberate intent to mislead gamers. Often developers may choose to incorrectly publish demo/advertisements as separate games as a cheap way to bypass paying Valve for marketing presence on the Steam front page, which may seem clever to them, but it's harmful behaviour and it's not good for gamers. It doesn't stop there, this game is also infested with mobile app store like microtransactions. This is a consumer hostile model that we don't need to see on PC. It's deceptively priced to gouge gamers, and that's a reason in itself to avoid this. Even after that, you're expected to pay up $6 USD to unlock content through DLC purchases. The game should not be considered completely unlocked until you empty your wallet for the developer. This is misleading and predatory pricing on a product falsely marketed as "free". Even as a free game, this couldn't find an audience. With a peak of [b]only 3 players[/b], it's clear the Steam community took one look and walked away. They literally couldn't pay people to spend time playing this. Advertisements and incorrectly published demos don't add +1 to your game collector count, they aren't full games. It's impossible for me to recommend this incorrectly published advertising spam to gamers, you deserve better than adverts.