redroom

[quote][b]Note: Dead PvP game[/b] This game contains no meaningful single player content. There's no viably populated servers/active player population. This game cannot be played as intended.[/quote] This seems like a game jam game or something... it doesn't come across as sincerely made, more of an experiment, and experiments are meant to die, not pollute Steam Direct. The idea is that the developer thought gamers only wanted 1v1 PvP, and they wanted only one weapon, and stupidly low TTK. The developer was wrong. Not satisfied with just being completely wrong, they went further and thought gamers like to use a text console to configure the game. It just keeps getting worse, and I am wondering if the point of this product was simply to insult gamers and the gaming industry. So, "redroom" is a dead PvP game. Why did it fail? It's video game autopsy time! [i]Almost every PvP exclusive game on Steam fails.[/i] Only a tiny proportion of them "go viral". This game failed for many of the same reasons those others fail. The chief of which is the developer thinking that their game will "go viral" without actually creating any reason for it do so. Competition amongst PvP centric games is extreme, and there's only a finite player base to appeal to. This game failed to reach any kind of critical mass and died as a result. Let's go into some of the reasons this particular game failed to appeal to gamers, despite the zero up front cost. First and foremost, there's no meaningful single player content. The developer gambled that other players would be an acceptable substitute for adding storytelling, level design etc to the Game. They lost that bet. Without a huge community of players or single player content to add a lasting value to the game, the game dies. Developers must learn that other players are not an acceptable substitute for adding content to a game. This feels more like a tech demo or a project smacked together hurriedly to try make a kind of minimum viable product just good enough to pass the developers unambitious idea and shove it into Steam Direct to see if you can actually pay and publish junk through Steam Direct. Yeah, you can. Is this good for gamers? Nope. The graphics here are particularly awful, minimalist monochrome low poly garbage where you can't even see what's going on... some of the laziest junk I've seen in days, 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. This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too. 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 7 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. All other issues aside (any of which would disqualify this from being worth your time), this is a game that relies on other players for it to be viable, and because there's not enough players, it's not viable. I can't recommend anyone downloads this, it's basically dead.