Skull Ball Heroes AKA Tuebor was an attempt at making an abandoned Early Access PvP only "violent" future sports themed third person shooter/PvP arena. Gameplay would have consisted of team based arena shooting with some sports related goals as you would have punted comical giant skulls around like footballs.
It failed. SteamDB shows the game peaked at 75 concurrent games, which is a pitiful number, this only happened for one day when they made the game "free" out of desperation, and now the game has practically no players, in fact, I was the first person to launch the game in over a month. It's that dead. The developers kept the game on life support until early 2021, despite their being no players, and now there's no updates for around 18 months. It's completely abandoned now.
Why did it fail? It's video game autopsy time!
First up the general quality of this abandoned game is woeful. PvP gamers have literally thousands of games to choose from, hundreds of AAA games that are either free or cost next to nothing. Games have to actually offer something if they want to compete for players time.
One of the reasons gamers turned away from this is because the developer suspiciously requires you to hand over your email address and other personally identifying information just to play the game. There's no reason for this given SteamWorks can easily handle all of that, so this is generally just done so the developers can harvest personal data, profile gamers and sell that personally identifying information to third parties. This is completely unacceptable and cannot be tolerated.
The developers made the terrible mistake of launching a multiplayer only game in Early Access. This is almost certain to kill the game. Most gamers will evaluate a game only once. If they do so when the game is incomplete, they will check it out, then abandon it (just like the developers did). When (IF) the game eventually does get around to release, there will be no players, because the developers burned the first impressions through their faulty Early Access experience. Players who saw the game and didn't like it because it was incomplete [i]do not come back[/i]. Multiplayer games must have a large population if they are to go "viral" and succeed, especially without single player content to fall back on. Releasing a multiplayer only game into early access kills the game population, and thus the game, before the game even launches.
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.
