Note: Dead multiplayer game
This game contains no meaningful single player content and requires a "massively multiplayer" population that does not exist. There's less than a dozen players, no properly populated servers. This multiplayer-only game cannot be played as intended.

There's a lot to break down here, but needless to say this VR exclusive World of Warcraft ripoff was a complete disaster. The game is funded from Steam sales, a Kickstarter, and a Patreon, and despite all that money the developer reneged on their committment to deliver the game. Nobody got refunded, the developers kept all the money they took from gamers without delivering a complete game. The broken shell of a game you see today is just a pre-alpha.

Worse, there's credible accounts of developers outright banning anyone who mentions these uncomfortable facts.

So, "Ilysia" is a dead multiplayer game. Why did it fail? It's video game autopsy time!

The chief cause of failure is the developer thinking that their game will "go viral" without actually creating any reason for it do so.

Competition amongst multiplayer centric games is extreme, and there's only a finite player base to appeal to. This game failed to reach any kind of critical mass and died as a result. Let's go into some of the reasons this particular game failed to appeal to gamers, despite the zero up front cost.

The developers abandoned this 10 months ago. It will never be completed. This unfinished game is just polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuinely, completely made games.

The game graphics look better than you might expect, but that's just because it looks like some or all of them are "borrowed" from asset stores or wherever. Gamers can tell... and it comes across as insincere. Even so this looks considerably worse than World of Warcraft did at launch... quite a joke considering how much money the developers harvested.

There's also the old adage that those who lack the budget and talent to make their own game assets usually lack the budget and talent to do the rest of the job of game development properly, too.

It's VR exclusive, and that shows the developer failed to understand the most basic axiom of VR game design... if the only cool thing about your product is VR support, your product is not cool.

You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality product, this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me.

The game is infested with unfixed bugs, glitches, and outright jankiness. All problems that the developers don't care about and declined to fix; Remember, money was their objective, not delivering a game.

On the important matter of pricing and value for gamers, there's a lot going on here with monetisation, so this really shouldn't be considered a truly free product because of that.

There's no initial download price, but the developer was delusionally charging $15 USD for this. That's after the Kickstarter, by the way.

Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It seems like a nice gesture for the game to have no up-front cost anymore, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded.

It's free for now, but the developer intends to charge for this if it ever leaves Early Access... but considering the poor public reception, it's likely this will not be one of the 25% of games that ever gets finished and leaves Early Access.

It's important to note that, despite this being such a low quality product, there's a number of positive reviews that all appeared immediately after the game launched, from suspiciously inactive Steam accounts that have reviewed almost no other games apart from this. Take the review score of this game with a grain of salt.

Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? What's the verdict?

Definitely not. This isn't worth it. I'm paraphrasing another reviewer here, but this should be a paid product... they'd have to pay people to download it.

I feel bad for those who paid for this game, thank god I was not one of them

Very fun so far, will update if anything changes.