Protonwar

Protonwar was a VR exclusive (I'll get into this later) 3D FPS PvP arena shooter with a painfully generic robot dudes theme. Gameplay consisted of jumping around on platforms and shooting other players in VR. So, like Dactyl Nightmare but with slightly better graphics. I guess the first thing to mention, which is very important, is that the developers claim the game works both in VR and non-VR modes, but this is not true. The main menu locks out KB+M controls and so you cannot interact with that menu if you don't have a VR controller. This prevents the game from being launched. Some basic testing wouldn't hurt, but this has been yet another failure story. Perhaps the developers intended for this to work in a non-VR mode, but their deliberate decision not to bother testing their own game devalues this theory. What matters for gamers are the resultant facts. It failed. SteamDB shows the game peaked at only 28 players, which is a pitiful number, barely enough to flesh out a server and now the game has practically no players, with numbers around 4-5 launching the game on any given day, not enough to create a viable PvP match. Why did it fail? It's video game autopsy time! The real killer is of course lack of adequate testing rendering the game unplayable for many. This is really basic stuff and the developers didn't even bother. 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. Part of the reason for the game failing was an attempt to actually charge money for this. There's hundreds of better, completely free FPS games, so they thought they could charge $10 USD for an inferior experience (that they didn't even bother testing). This is another deterrent for gamers. They did make the game free later on, but by that time it was way too late and didn't impact on the lack of interest from gamers. 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. Finally there's the obscure choice to make the game VR exclusive (because it doesn't work in non-VR modes due to lack of basic testing). Developers must learn that while VR is great, if the only thing that makes the game great is the VR, then the game isn't great at all. The Steam hardware survey shows only 2% of gamers have a VR headset, so designing a game that's PvP only and can only succeed if it reaches thousands and thousands of gamers, then making sure the game can only appeal to less than 2% of the gamers on Steam is frankly suicidal, from a business perspective. [quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote] The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says: [quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote] The developer falsely claims the defect in their game doesn't exist. How would they know? they obviously never conducted adequate testing on the game. Arguing with customers and denying objectively proven fact is a curious position to take. Successful game developers generally don't deny the facts and instead test their software and fix the bugs. I guess we know the approach failed developers take. The developer weirdly boasts that they wasted 4 years of their life on this busted game, and this was the best they can come up with... a dismal failure that gamers overwhelmingly rejected. It doesn't matter if the developer spent 20 years on this or slapped it together in 2 days. If GTA:V was put together in a week, it would still be a highly recommendable game. All that matters to gamers is the quality of the game, and the laughably optimistic $10 USD for this train wreck is absolutely something gamers considered when rejecting this. It's a completely bizarre proposition to suggest that the quality of a game is purely proportional to the time spent in development, and shows quite clearly that the developer here is wildly out of touch with gamers, which goes a long way to explaining this dumpster fire. Nothing in the developers pointless response changes the objective facts about this broken, rejected game, and my review stands unaltered.