Open Feedback Letter to the Development Team of Barman Simulator
Dear VirtualMind Developers,
After a long‑time gameplay experience, I am writing this comprehensive, objective feedback letter. I deeply regret spending money on Barman Simulator, even though I purchased it during a seasonal discount. The game’s historical maximum discount only reaches 37%, and the promotion range has stayed extremely narrow for the whole sales cycle. The final discounted price is still very close to the original price, which means the game is obviously over‑priced no matter whether players buy it at full price or on sale. This work is far from a finished commercial simulation game, and it is just a rough, unfinished experimental prototype pushed onto the official Steam store. Almost all of the following defects have been fully verified by a large number of player evaluations in the store area, and every single problem is the real‑world experience that every buyer will encounter after launch.
First of all, the game performance optimization is completely out of control, and it brings extremely terrible operation experience to ordinary computer configurations. I personally encountered the most extreme hardware failure: the startup loading process lasted for more than five full minutes, and when I tried to exit the game normally, the program completely froze my entire computer system for ten consecutive minutes. The whole desktop lost all response, and no system hotkeys, task‑manager shortcuts can force‑close the running process. My graphics card and CPU ran at full load for no reasonable reason, which caused unnecessary hardware loss. Apart from my personal extreme experience, massive players on the community also report universal performance faults: constant random frame drops and severe stuttering during normal gameplay, frequent unexpected crash exits, corrupted save files and extremely slow archive reading speed. Countless players lost their long‑running operating progress because of broken archives. Worse still, the game does not provide any basic graphics‑adjustment panel to lower hardware consumption, and its memory and graphics occupancy is unreasonably high, which cannot run smoothly even on mainstream gaming computers.
Secondly, the simulation authenticity and physical interaction feedback is completely absent, and the overall scene art and scene construction is extremely rough and perfunctory. The whole bar map lacks reasonable detail design. Most of the bar counter equipment and operating facilities are functionally incomplete and cannot be used normally. A huge quantity of interactive props are just empty static models without any practical operation functions. Every core operation including cocktail mixing, bar wiping, drink delivery is stiff, delayed and unresponsive. There is no real pouring logic, liquid physical feedback or weight feeling during bartending, so the whole operation experience cannot meet the basic standard of a qualified bartending simulation game. A large number of players have recorded obvious NPC artificial intelligence bugs. Guests will randomly place drink orders that the player has not unlocked yet. Even if the player hands over the completely correct wine to customers, the guests will still get angry and complain. Dissatisfied drunk guests will trigger chain quarrels among all customers in the bar. The serving click‑detection mechanism has serious recognition errors. Players often deliver drinks to the wrong guest by accident, and the game will immediately activate the full‑order punishment, bringing completely unnecessary frustration and negative mood to players.
Thirdly, the core gameplay rules are designed to be extremely harsh, with almost zero player freedom, and the whole working loop is extremely depressing and tedious. The punishment mechanism is extremely unreasonable and lacks basic fault tolerance. As long as you make one tiny mistake when preparing cocktails, such as wrong wine ratio, wrong decoration or slight spilling, the whole customer order will be rejected directly, and you will get zero income, which leaves almost no room for player errors. The cleaning system is repetitive and extremely cumbersome. Every countertop, dining table, floor and stool needs to be wiped repeatedly manually. There are no one‑click cleaning shortcuts or automatic cleaning functions, and cleaning work will occupy most of the player’s working time in each shift. The open‑ended bar management content advertised in the store introduction and promotional trailer is basically not implemented in the official version. Players cannot freely arrange the layout of the bar, purchase a full set of diversified bar equipment, or adjust reasonable service rules. Players are completely locked into rigid, repetitive assembly‑line work, and there is basically no independent playable space.
Fourth, the overall game content reserves are extremely thin, and there is almost no follow‑up playable content to support long‑term experience. The number of available drink recipes is very scarce, and the types of customer models are single and homogeneous. All the gameplay contents promised in the promotional video, including random bar emergencies, employee recruitment and training system, store renovation and upgrade mechanism, have not been put into the game. After a very short opening process, players will quickly fall into a completely repetitive working cycle, and there is no new gameplay content to maintain the fun of the game. The entire map is flooded with a large number of hidden bugs: invisible collision walls, props stuck in the ground, distorted human character models, and wrong placement of bar supplies, which seriously destroy the immersion of the game.
Fifth, the game is seriously inconsistent with the store page publicity, and it belongs to typical false publicity. The official store introduction publicizes a rich, highly‑free bar‑management simulation work, but the finished product players receive is only a rough, unpolished test demo with fatal defects in every module. The whole game is full of unfinished settings and missing functions, and it does not reach the minimum quality threshold of a formal released game.
I wasted plenty of my spare time on this low‑quality game. Every gaming session was filled with system freezes, sudden crashes, unreasonable heavy punishment and repetitive boring cleaning work, which constantly drove me to extreme irritability and anxiety. Even though I bought the game during a discount, the discount amplitude is extremely small, and the defective game is still obviously over‑priced.
I hold very great disappointment to your development team. Selling an unfinished, bug‑filled game with negligible discount strength is extremely irresponsible to every paying player. I sincerely hope that your team will immediately launch large‑scale technical optimization, re‑balance the unfair difficulty rules, repair all widespread NPC bugs and physical operation failures, and make up for the missing bar‑facility functions and rich playable content. If you keep ignoring these core problems, this game will keep accumulating massive negative reviews and completely damage the reputation of your studio.
Sincerely,
A highly disappointed player
