Tales of the Magic Ball: The Lost Sorcerer

"Tales of the Magic Ball: The Lost Sorcerer" is not an asset flip! Of course my first instinct was to smash the "Asset flip!" button, but as always a bit of research helps. This is a tech demo/showcase from an asset creator (which is why the assets look like asset store stuff, because that's what they are), a set of his own assets lazily dropped onto a basic game template for a physics ball roller. I'm not sure how much of this is just asset showcasing and how much of it was just an attempt to see if it's possible to publish a game for $100 on Steam Direct (yes, it is). What do you do in the game? Badly done rolling ball physics puzzling. This is kind of the inverse of an asset flip, usually we can be quick to point out when people can't make their own game assets, they usually can't do the rest of game development properly either. Here, surprisingly, the developer can make their own assets. Shame about the rest of the job of game development, but I guess this is why the artists aren't the same guys doing the physics engine, netcode, etc etc etc in real development companies. Despite the almost tolerable visuals, the controls and handling are a janky mess, there's not enough polish... it's easy to see why this failed after just a few minutes trying to play it. So I guess this gets a C- grade for the low poly mobile app tier cartoony game assets and an F- for everything else. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $9 USD for this. I guess if the assets aren't selling on the asset stores, they gotta monetize them somehow? 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. 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 11 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Given that this free title won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library? I think you should give this one a miss. Although it's free, your time and storage are valuable resources, and the market is filled with superior options. At least it's not an asset flip.