Dev Launches $20 Game With 10 Minutes of Content, Gets Immediately Beaten to Death by Steam Reviews

You have to admire the sheer balls on display here. Releasing a game with a single, tiny map that can be beaten in under ten minutes and slapping a $20 price tag on it isn't just optimistic, it's a declaration of war on your customers' wallets.

The developer of CUFFBUST learned this lesson the hard way. Within hours of launch, the game’s Steam page was a smoldering crater of negative reviews from players who felt, to put it mildly, ripped the fuck off. The backlash was so swift and so brutal that the developer had no choice but to hit the panic button.

A Ten-Minute Heist

The complaints all tell the same sad story. Players who jumped into CUFFBUST found a game with one map, zero replayability, and AI guards that posed less of a threat than a gentle breeze. Review after review slammed the game as a "fraud" and a "scam," with one player noting the tutorial is longer than the actual game.

For twenty dollars, players got an experience they could fully exhaust in the time it takes to make a cup of coffee. It’s a bold pricing strategy, and it backfired spectacularly. The game was immediately labeled a "horrible," "unfinished," and "brain dead" experience that was leaning entirely on the community to save it with the map editor. It’s a classic case of unfulfilled promises, but on a speedrun.

The Community Will Fix It!

Ah, yes, the new developer mantra: "Ship it empty and let the players make the content." CUFFBUST launched with a map editor, and it's painfully obvious the strategy was to let the community build the game that the developer didn't.

This is a lazy, cynical approach to game design that I’m sick to death of seeing. Relying on your customers to do your job for you is simply an admission that you didn't have a finished product ready for launch. This isn't a Mario Maker-style game where the creation tool is the point, this was supposed to be a complete co-op experience.

The Inevitable Backpedal

Faced with a tidal wave of refunds and a "Mostly Negative" review score, the developer did the only thing they could: they slashed the price in half, dropping it to $9.99 just hours after release. "I've been seeing the feedback on the price point... and have decided that a lower price would be more fair," the developer wrote in an announcement.

While it was a necessary move, it was also a slap in the face to everyone who bought the game at its original ludicrous price. It's a classic case of a developer getting greedy, getting caught, and then trying to do damage control after the fact. It’s the kind of PR disaster that makes Randy Pitchford’s Twitter meltdowns look like savvy business moves.

This whole mess could have been avoided. This game is a prime candidate for Early Access, a label that exists specifically for games that are not fucking finished. Instead, we got a full release that felt more like a paid demo, and a developer who learned a very public, very painful lesson about what happens when you try to sell snake oil to gamers.