Digital Influence

bad "game" that doesn't actually remember the choices you made when factoring them into the fate of your social media site. for example, i chose to have ads instead of a subscription based service and to comply with the government in banning "fake news". when checking the "media info" and news for my site, everyone seems to love it and, after a bit of an initial struggle, we are making a profit on the site. at the end of the "game", it said my company failed due to too many ads, a subscription based model, and not complying with the government. not only were the last 2 options incorrect, but it also never showed any ads on the site. your user follower count also never changes. what's the point in posting if my follower count is constantly 0? finally, the word count for posts is stupid. your word count is extremely limited; however, if you check your feed you will see user posts that are significantly longer. there's just an overall lack of consistency with the features and storyline. it's fine if the story is for the company to fail, but then why waste my time with decisions that don't actually affect anything? there's already so little to do in the "game", that what you're left wi…

"Digital Influence" is less of a game and more of a desktop themed "Choose Your Own Adventure" e-book... and there's not much going on here. As we all know, E-books aren't games, and yet that's why we come to Steam... for games. Which this is not. It's slapped together with the craptastic blight on gaming that is Ren'Py, used to dump hundreds, if not thousands of badly written e-book fanfictions onto Steam. Trying to do something new, but badly, the developer of this E-book tried to make it look like a real simulator/business tycoon kind of game, but really, you shouldn't be fooled. This is just more Ren'Py anime club dropout high school fanfiction stuff that should be avoided by all. And, indeed, was. This is "free" enough, at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 2 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should y…

I don't like to give bad reviews to free indies, but the game is just not very good. A social media management sim is a good idea, but this is a very low-res execution, full of broken English and shallow choices that might not even be reflected properly in the wrap-up at the end. I don't even understand why because it's really easy to map conditional text onto binary choices in Ren'Py. It's nice that you can make your own profile, but it's really rather pointless because all the engagement is randomly generated and the character limit is ridiculously short, likely to force posts to be one line. This limit doesn't exist for profile bios, so you can totally mess up the formatting there. Running a social media company is complex, and games that cover the topic well will likely need to be accordingly complex. Simplifying usually doesn't work well. I'm sorry, devs, an idea is only as good as its execution.

I think negative reviewers are mostly into games that are more action-packed. I, personally, like this style! It was fun and sort of cozy, short, good if you're bored and want something quick to play. I don't think there's anything /bad/ about it, besides the length. It would be wonderous to have more choices and a longer game, maybe more features like replying to posts, seeing what decisions users would favor more /before/ you choose it, and a pros/cons sort of chart of said choices. It's a minimalistic game with not too much content, but sometimes games are better that way.

I'm never getting these 7 minutes back

Complied with the government against misinformation, got told I didn't comply with regulation.