The only reason I can think to release it as it was, was for tax write odd purposes with how much money it was going to lose.

I’m Commander Shepard, and this is the dumbest comment on Lemmy not to come out of .ml

It’s less that I hate free games, it’s more that a lot of games on Steam that are free are either the freemium model, where they are basically mobile games with inapp purchases you’re expected to buy to make progress, or some some shovelware trash that’s a one trick pony and generally just a knock off of something more popular and better executed.

Yes there are examples of great free to play games, but overall so many of them on steam are not worth downloading and clog up the trending list since if someone really wanted their game full of microtransactions to get noticed, they can just work a bot net to register new accounts and download the game to cause the steam algorithm to pick it up and put it on the trending page despite it having a poor user count.

When your core gameplay loop is all of 15 minutes long that feeds into a 40-60 hour repetitive grind to unlock a slightly better item, new title or recolored cosmetic, combined with a complete absence of quality or competent writing, innovative mechanics while it’s apparent most of the budget went into marketing and pre-rendered cutscenes that can be just watched on youtube, yeah it’s bad to give potential customers a 30 minute demo that displays everything your game is without hinting any additional benefit for purchasing the full game.