This is a bizarre attempt to try crack the market for gamers who want to play PvP arenas but don't have an internet connection, and also prefer hideously ugly bad graphics in their games. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is an incredibly niche population of gamers.
So, Vectonic 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. There's also no online play, so that sharply cuts the available player base to just people who want to play locally.
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.
The graphics here are particularly awful, 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 (after it was made free). Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise.
It's free... now, but it wasn't before. The developer was charging $5 USD for this. Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It's a nice gesture for the game to be given away for free, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product.
Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 6 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it?
Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.
