[quote][b][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_flip]Warning: Asset Flip![/url][/b]
"Origin of Decay" is one of literally thousands of creatively bankrupt asset flips/kitbashes infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere.[/quote]
This is something nobody has ever done before, making an asset flipped first person zombie FPS game. Sigh. It's easy to see why this was pulled from Steam... it's got all the same hallmarks as all the other asset flips on the platform.
"Origin of Decay" is a basic asset flip, kitbashed out of a bunch of someone else's game assets all thrown in a blender. This is creatively bankrupt stuff, effectively plagiarism, and it's bad for everyone.
While there's no up front price for this asset flip, the other problem with asset flips is that when developers aren't capable of doing their job and creating high quality assets, it's also true they can't do any of the rest of the job of a game developer either. That's definitely true for "Origin of Decay", and this kind of asset flipping never results in games that have quality or value for PC gamers.
The creators gave up on this 7 years and 2 months ago. It is destined to remain unfinished. This junkware is just polluting Steam and making it difficult for gamers to fully finished, completed games. That's not good for gamers.
You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality product, this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me.
This game is fairly dated at 8 years old... and even back then it looked old and busted compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked bad then, it looks worse now.
Let's talk about pricing and the actual value this has for gamers.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $11 USD for this.
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.
A peak of [b]14 concurrent players[/b] (according to SteamDB) for a "free" game is a disastrous public reception. Out of 130 million potential players here on Steam, almost nobody was interested. Even though this is "free". That level of rejection speaks a lot for the quality of the game.
Because the game is removed from Steam (certainly a win for gamers), you can't add it to your library. Hopefully this review can at least help people understand why this failed, and why, if you do happen to have this dead game in your library before it was killed, it's not worth downloading.
