Nifty Smashers

[quote][b][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtransaction]Warning: Microtransaction infested mobile app![/url][/b] This game is infested with a toxic mobile app style cash shop. You will be prompted to and expected to give money to the developers through this cash shop to buy in-game goods so you can play the game.[/quote] "Nifty Smashers" is one of thousands of nasty mobile apps infesting the "free" section of Steam, but it's not really free... note that the developers failed to warn gamers as they are supposed to about the mobile app cash shop, but it's correctly put up as a warning on the Google Play page for this mobile app. Trying to mislead Steam gamers really harshes my mellow... it's unethical, especially when it's done for profit. This mobile app looks a lot like a really godawful Super Smash Bros ripoff (we can only hope Nintendo goes all Palworld on them) that the developer couldn't even be bothered finishing. I mean, fair enough, it was garbage from the outset, rubbish looking low poly assets with pixelcrap textures. I can imagine the development meeting, "Wow, our game assets look like crap. How can we make them look even worse? I know! Pixelcrap!!!!" There's only a superficial game here. The game visuals and the game itself are incredibly shallow... think of them as the cabinet dress theme on a poker machine at the casino. That's basically what this is. So really, the mobile app "game" is just a veneer, a thin skin wrapped around a nasty, predatory mobile app cash shop. Putting that toxic mobile app monetisation aside... this is a mobile app. I didn't spend thousands on a gaming PC so I could pretend it's an iPhone, and I don't think you did either... this kind of mobile app has no place in your Steam library. As with all mobile scams, you're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality mobile app, this is specifically designed to invalidate your consumer rights and destroy your right to privacy. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me. The developers abandoned this 7 months ago. It will never be completed. This unfinished game is just polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuinely, completely made games. And, despite not being able to finish the game, they had all the time in the world to implement a fully working cash shop and financial transaction back end. Wow, it's almost like being a game wasn't the priority, but the toxic cash shop was. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 7 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.