@unrealdp said:
It's a shame that the Steam page has been getting a ton of negative reviews that state "game is trash, has been abandoned." Honestly the game is pretty well featured and has some great mod support.
I have learned that Gamers (the kind that write Steam reviews) do not like it when an Early Access game is not finished, or hits 1.0 but is not "really" finished to their satisfaction. Gamers do not deal with abandonment well.
Another more extreme example that comes to mind is Double Fine's Space Base DF-9, which now sits at Overwhelmingly Negative on Steam.
Granted, that game (sort of a space Dwarf Fortress) hit 1.0 in a pretty rough state that still needed a lot of bug fixing and never got a lot of the features implied in Early Access, and then the dev team for it mostly got laid off and the game was never officially patched anymore. Though to their credit the Lua source code was made available and fans made their own patches/mods/updates for the game. From the sounds of it, after an initial small burst of sales, it kinda stopped selling during its early access. Call it a failure of marketing or whatever, but the game wasn't finding an audience that justified ongoing dev costs to keep adding features to the game, so they had to make the business call to sink a bit more dev money into it to basically 1.0 release it as-is.
Even with that explanation, it seems like not many owners of the game were very sympathetic to Double Fine on that one. Keep in mind this was 2014, during that fully independent, hit-or-miss 2011-2017 period of Double Fine where they were putting out like 5 games a year of varying quality. I couldn't tell you how responsible some of their financial decisions were during that time, and now it's Microsoft calling the shots.
Back to World of Horror: Gamers get mad even when a developer says "Look, we really tried with this Early Access game, but nobody was buying it so we're ceasing development." I imagine Gamers get madder when there isn't any explanation at all, as they imagine the indie dev to be some kind of cartoon villain running away with a burlap sack full of gold coins. Gamers are the worst.
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