Note: Dead PvP game
This game contains no meaningful single player content. There are no available servers and no player population. This game cannot be played as intended.

This is yet another ripoff of Dead by Daylight. One player gets to be the monster, and everyone else has to fight/survive against that player. It's been done before, obviously, but better. Developers need to bring something more to the table than "Well my game is Dead by Daylight, but worse."

So, Dirge is a dead PvP game. Why did it fail? It's video game autopsy time!

Almost every PvP exclusive game on Steam fails. Only a tiny proportion of them "go viral". This game failed for many of the same reasons those others fail. The chief of which is the developer thinking that their game will "go viral" without actually creating any reason for it do so.

Competition amongst PvP 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.

First and foremost, there's no meaningful single player content. The developer gambled that other players would be an acceptable substitute for adding storytelling, level design etc to the Game. They lost that bet.

Without a huge community of players or single player content to add a lasting value to the game, the game dies.

Developers must learn that other players are not an acceptable substitute for adding content to a game.

The graphics in this game are really quite good, which at least makes the game look more appealing. And while it's vital for any game to have impressive visuals (gaming is a visual medium, after all), there's more to a game than just the graphics. To be worth a gamers time, the game must match top tier visuals with top tier gameplay, and that's not happening here.

There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging an eye watering $30 USD for this. Even after that there's a greedy $15 worth of DLC, with some monster types/game modes locked behind a paywall... this is NOT, therefore, free at all.

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 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?

Nope. This isn't worth downloading. There's no financial cost up-front, but you'd still be spending your time and a little hard drive space on a product that's far from the best. There's thousands of better alternatives on Steam.

Bad Game