Title accused of fraudulent activity and incompetence.
Deorum Online is the latest title to get the boot by Valve following complaints that the game was effectively a scam on the platform. Despite Deorum Online being listed as “free to play,” gamers downloaded the title only to find themselves shuffled off to a third party website, asked to register an account and, you guessed it, pay a fee to activate the account. Twenty bucks.
As one might anticipate, the reaction to this scheme was not well-received. As of the this publishing, Deorum Online has a 22% “mostly negative” rating on Steam with many of the reviews pointing toward the underhanded sales tactic. The explanation seems obvious; developer Huto Production attempting to avoid Valve’s 30% cut on the store front. The Deorum Online Steam store page does not reference the client cost.
But in addition to its sales scheme, the players of Deorum also haven’t had a great time. According to reviews, the game is very incompetently built. Client-side data access has apparently allowed for all manner of unscrupulous behavior and a botched trial are just two examples.
As one reviewer observed;
EDIT: Since my original review, multiple things have happened.
-Someone has hacked the game, putting swastikas all around the map
-Presumably the same person has also destroyed all the player housing around the map
-The Christmas “Trial” happened, which was so poorly implemented it could be redeemed INFINITELY, meaning you could get INFINITE gametime by just spamming the trial redeem button.
-Multiple price cuts down to even 50% of the original “value” of the game.This shows that not only WAS I RIGHT in every single value being client-side, but also that the dev clearly doesn’t care about this game and doesn’t have even CLOSE to the required skills to pull off a multiplayer (let alone a MASSIVELY multiplayer) game.
The dev is clearly using this as a quick cash grab before he pulls a runner with all of your money, this is highlighted by the constant game “sales”.The fact that steam still has this game on their store reflects badly on them.
Developer Huto Production, a one man crew, responded in exactly the way MMO Fallout readers have come to expect; Seemingly abandoning the project. A Kickstarter was attempted surprisingly after Deorum launched on Steam, bringing in a whole $2 by the time funding ended on November 26. The Deorum website has been down for at least a month and half, the developer has not posted on his Discord since December, and with Valve officially intervening it looks like this may be the end of Deorum Online.
It certainly is the end of this game’s presence on the biggest PC platform.
What have we learned today? Don’t store important data on the client’s end of your game. Don’t defraud Valve of their 30% cut. If you are going to try and swindle people with a free client and hidden game cost, don’t forget those people have access to Steam reviews. And finally the hammer of Valve is slow, but it lands hard and mostly in the right place.
Thanks to SirViolentDeath for the tip.
MMO Fallout 