I want to blame the company but from their point of view this business model works so I understand why it keeps happening.
Steam refunds are great for situations like these but I doubt the average casual knows how easy it is. The other platforms are much stricter on refunds.
There’s also the culture shift of gamers defending broken releases with “at least they fixed it!” Or “they released a roadmap for future fixes” that encourages early releases.
A lot of the player count on steam is users AFK idling so they don’t have to get stuck in queue again. My discord friend list is a ton of idle users on Helldivers 2 all day and night
The DnD claim has a lot of validity, as a fan of DnD. Have you looked into it much?
The DnD devs are accused of working on Nexons game, stealing source code, leaving nexon, and buying the same assets Nexon used to rapidly build DnD from p3’s ashes. The main leader who quit nexon directly poached from the p3 team to build the clone game as well.
I’m no Korean law expert, but there’s something worth looking into there.
Palworld just has a similar art style, and the idea of catching monsters in balls. There’s a lot more mechanics to palworld than Pokémon has, whereas DnD was actually P3 but made by a new team.
There was an image of a Pokémon mesh or framework being very similar to a Pal’s, but the author didn’t mention they manipulated the size and perspective to make them look closer but other users noticed.
Nope, no Kickstarter or obvious public funding before the early access “release”.
There’s a chance some people weren’t able to get refunded but due to Steam’s refund policy I suspect most got their money back.
If it was always intended to be a total scam and never release they’d likely have used their own launcher to bypass the Steam revenue share and refund policy.
Due to the way Steam refunds work I feel this wasn’t their end goal unless they really didn’t think it through at all.
The theory i subscribe to is that they intended to release a “decent” game but had no experience or intent to make it themselves. The marketing hype machine was to build community hype, which would drive investor funding so they could pay for new talent or to just outsource most of the work. I’m guessing that either didn’t materialize or they mismanaged that plan.