F2P MMO Bless Unleashed Conquered Steam, but Not Player Hearts
Bless Unleashed has been quite successful on Steam. At least in terms of the number of active players, as the console MMORPG's PC release didn't generate much enthusiasm.
A reboot of an MMORPG from a couple of years ago that failed to gain popularity twice wouldn't seem like a candidate for the Steam charts. Meanwhile, for five days after the release, the free Bless Unleashed from Round 8 Studios has been frequently featured in the top ten activity lists on Valve's platform. At the time of writing this text, the title is being played by over 60,000 people at the same time.
Unfortunately, the title's popularity does not translate into praise from the players. Yes, Bless Unleashed has been rated by 11 thousand Internet users, but barely half said positive things about the game. Resentment is aroused mainly by monetization model, including the de facto necessity to buy a special item if you want to avoid fighting other the players after reaching level 30 (for $2 you have peace of mind for... an entire hour), which effectively makes life miserable for PvE enthusiasts. There are also complaints about optimization, because Bless Unleashed on Unreal Engine 4 supposedly doesn't work any better than Bless Online used to on UE3.
However, if Bless Unleashed apparently didn't appeal to most players, why is it so popular on Steam? Free-to-play model as well as a dry spell on the MMORPG market, especially in the context of problems faced by the devs of World of Warcraft and the subsequent delay of New World's release, may be contributing factors. After all, checking out the free-to-play competitor costs nothing, but count on the time.
