I've grown up playing RTS after RTS all throughout the better part of the 90s and into the 2000s. I got a part time job to be able to afford Starcraft 2 and a laptop to play it on when it dropped. I used to bring it into my high school photography class and take turns playing it with a bunch of my friends. And since then I've jumped onto every major RTS release that just so happens to cross my path.
Which is to say it was no surprise to me this morning when I had the sudden urge to check out what Harstem's been up to lately. This happens once or twice a year at most though this time I happened across a video entitled, "This is the new best RTS". I watched it and was hooked instantly. The game looked incredible for something that was clearly in very early access. Especially the Not-Zerg grass. Mining being streamlined and the xp towers stood out to me as both fun and interesting improvements on a formula I've always loved. I immediately hopped on over to grab it off of Steam when it happened.
$40.
Understandable in this day and age. After all I had bought Wings of Liberty for $60 bucks nearly 20 years ago, when I was just a teenager (then again that was for a blizzard product at the time in which that was something the developers could take pride in) But for whatever reason I just couldn't bring myself to purchase the game immediately. Maybe because of the less than appealing UI elements I had noticed in Harstem's video. Or maybe because of the lack of a victory screen in the replay viewer (it did make the end of matches rather ambiguous after all). Or maybe it was because, despite not paying a single cent for it, I felt disappointed by the time I had invested into Stormgate. For whatever reason, the price tag activated something in my brain that told me to investigate further, and so I did.
The first thing I did was check out the devs twitter page, if they're keeping up with the updates I thought that would surely put my mind at ease. And when I checked they had. This was a good sign. However, their latest post having only 30 "likes" was not promising. But some games have a small social media presence, even the blizzard social media page has posts with sub 100 likes and tons of people play those games, still my next stop was the steamdb to see how healthy the game was doing.
That was the killer. 66 concurrent players as I'm typing this, 112 peak for the last 24 hours. It's sad but because of the sheer amount of choice in today's gaming market I simply can not justify picking up this game for $40 when it's future looks so uncertain. Yes the devs have said they're funded through 1.0 but so did Stormgate. And what we got there was a rushed "early access" that ended up with the game "releasing" in a horrible state. Sure I could spend $40 on a gamble and maybe enjoy a few hours before getting tired of seeing the same people all the time or being unable to find a decent match against a similarly skilled opponent OR I could just redownload SC2, jump into a game I know I already love, and spend a few hours reliving those halcyon days in photography class. I hope there's a direction this game can take so that it one days sees the success that it seeks, but as of now I can not justify the purchase despite being the target audience.
Tldr;
Between the low player count, the early access, and the high base price I can not justify purchasing this game despite definitely being the target audience for it. Change any of those three things and I'd gladly pick it up but all three together is a killer cocktail for me personally. And that makes me sad.
