Potion Commotion

It is fun. Do not buy yet, it's gonna be free soon -_- If I only knew... I do not like the fact that you need to keep your pc up and running this game for 12 hours straight to get all achievements... who even does that?

[i]Potion Commotion[/i] is a brainless clicker/incrementer... you know the type, click on stuff to make numbers go up so you can buy stuff to help you click on stuff to make numbers go up so you can buy stuff to... you get the idea. The brainless gameplay is, unsusprisingly, accompanied with an equally low quality technical implementation and poor presentation, resulting in yet another horribly low quality shovelware game that might as well have been done in a web browser. This clicker/incrementer has a "potion making" theme and looks like a Flash game. I'd almost say it was sincerely made but it comes across like the developer spent more time working out how to monetize the product than making a game anyone would want to play (spoiler: This was a huge flop, player counts below). Here's another case where Itch failed. They have like, ONE job... to act as containment to prevent poorly made amateur shovelware from leaking out onto platforms where gamers might see them and lose hope in the gaming industry. But here we are. The participation trophies and hi-5's from the group hug weren't enough and some of the amateur drivel they're supposed to protect us from got out. 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 game features really lacklustre 2D visuals (does the developer not know 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid-1990s?). Gamers don't spend thousands of dollars on gaming rigs and the latest 3D graphics cards to play 2D games. Even mobile phones and game consoles can do 3D graphics now. There's no excuse. This game is fairly dated at 5 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. 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. There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $1 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. Even after that, you're expected to pay up $15 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". In terms of public reception, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it. It's important to note that, despite this being such a low quality product, there's a number of positive reviews that all appeared immediately after the game launched, from suspiciously inactive Steam accounts that have reviewed almost no other games apart from this. Take the review score of this game with a grain of salt. Given that this free title won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library? Pass on this one. 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.