This image comes from a game called Balls Kicking Simulator 2016. I would say we’ve hit peak Steam Greenlight, but I’m not sure that’s possible anymore.
Here’s a trailer to prove that, yes, this is a real game that exists:
The game’s developers claim it’s a joke—likely at the expense of Steam’s hurl-$100-into-a-garbage-bin game submission process—but that doesn’t change the fact that, gag or not, this is the kind of thing that tends to grab eyes on Greenlight, a user-driven service. To get noticed by armchair critics and trolls in a sea of mediocrity, developers paint with exaggerated brush strokes—extreme gags and extreme attempts at “edginess,” but rarely anything extremely unique or interesting because that doesn’t stand out as immediately. Many of those games make it onto other parts of Steam—Early Access or even the main store—contributing to a serious quality control problem.
Balls Kicking Simulator’s own discussion board sums it up:
After years of saying Steam Greenlight will eventually be drowned in the infinite blackness of an unforgiving sea (or your own equally painful-sounding metaphor of choice) and replaced with something better, Valve still hasn’t done much about it. It’s a mound of shit with occasional gems poking through, desperate for air. And so, it has come to this.
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