[quote][b]Warning: Dead PVP Game[/b]
This game has no single player content, and no playable PvP servers. There is no functioning PvP population, it's a dead game, and cannot be played.[/quote]
[quote][b][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_flip]Warning: Asset Flip![/url][/b]
Noob Squad is a Digital Homicide style asset flip, or what Valve calls a "Fake Game". The "developer" paid for/pirated a few Unity asset store packs, dumped them all in a blender, and submitted it to Valve as if they're real game developers.[/quote]
Two notable criteria for what makes an asset flip instead of legitimate use of stock assets are whether those assets comprise the majority of the game, and whether the "developer" properly credited the people who created most of the assets in the game. This game fails both of those tests. The "developers" here didn't credit any of the artists and real, actual game developers who created the assets here, so this is plagiarism, as well as cash grab shovelware.
In this case, the asset flipper took a bunch of generic Unity asset store FPS assets and made an extremely lazy FPS arena shooter for the purpose of email harvesting. It has no value or merit as a real game.
Antonio Renna have a known history of trying to scam people into paying them money for someone else's work, through this account or through closely linked/alt accounts. One example of Antonio Renna doing this is [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/931250]Pixel Royale[/url], which is really the "[url=https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/systems/unitz-battlegrounds-117943]UnitZ Battlegrounds[/url]" asset, written by the actual developers, Hardworker Studio.
Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
SteamDB shows the game hit all-time peak player numbers just after launch, with only a tiny 359 concurrent users, which is a pitiful number, and now the game has practically no players, with nobody playing at all, just one or two people logging on every week or so then quickly deleting the game when they see how bad it is. Why did it fail? It's video game autopsy time!
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.
The developers appear to be involved in suspicious data harvesting as they eschew SteamWorks (because SteamWorks does not facilitate privacy invasion in the ways the developers prefer) in favour of demanding users hand over their email address and other private, personal details. Presumably this is so they can profile you, collect data on you, combine that data with other sources and sell your private information off to the highest bidder (and, in fact, anyone else who is willing to pay for it). That's reprehensible and must not be tolerated. I'm sure they'll swear black and blue they don't, so "just trust them", but I wouldn't trust these shady developers as far as I could throw them. An ethical developer would use SteamWorks. Stay safe out there.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's that modest 300+ spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
Unethically, the developers have left this on the Steam store in an unplayable and broken state (because there's no players and no single player content). It's the responsibility of the developer to maintain their product, ensure it runs on all modern PCs, or if they determine there's defects and the game doesn't work, or the population dies, they should remove it from sale instead of misleadingly trying to scam gamers into buying knowingly defective products.
This is harmful to Steam and to gamers, not just because it's a direct and intentional attempt to scam people, but because it takes a share of the marketing space and visibility away from other games. It's polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuine games and for genuine indie developers who put months or years into making proper games find an audience.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
The developer is deliberately and unethically trying to scam gamers into paying them the almost scam-like price of $1 USD for a game they know is broken. Don't give it to them. Remember that if you buy a game from an unethical developer, you're putting your money at risk.
