Despite all the exposure the game has gotten, it currently has less online players[1] than games like "Tennis Elbow 4"[2] (by a factor of 4).

It's not even in the top 5000, because it is objectively terrible. People would rather play the original Life is Strange one more time (despite a remaster being out), than play this game.

At some point you really have to start getting suspicious why it keeps coming up.

The number of reviews vs. number of actual players online doesn't make sense when compared to peers in its genre either. It has a similar number of reviews as Life is Strange Remastered, but it loses to the 4 years old re-release of an 11 years old story-based game by an order of magnitude. For a genre that that has extremely top-heavy player count charts this doesn't make sense.

Funnily enough Life is Strange Remastered had a bit of a revival around that game's release, probably because people decided they'd rather play LiS.

Entertainment media entertaining nobody is just objectively bad at its job and the blatant astroturfing and nepo-baby-pampering adds an unsavory dimension to it.

1: https://steamcharts.com/app/2582320

2: https://steamcharts.com/app/760640

It's not objectively terrible. It's subjective - entirely.

It is a 3 hour long game with 4k or so reviews.

Life is strange original has 70K reviews and is 14 hours long.

The remaster has 4000+ reviews and again, is 14 hours long. These games are also all time favourites that fans do replay from time to time. If has more replayability than mixtape, despite it being fairly linear.

A 3 hour one time only game does not retain players on the charts like a game that takes multiple play sessions to finish. Or a game like "tennis elbow" which has far lower max concurrent (like, nowhere near the concurrent max mixtape has) but is a sim game that if it's your jam you will repeatedly come back to.

Its very simple - it's not a game for you, and you have to understand that these types of games absolutely have their niche fandoms who love this kind of stuff.

There is no conspiracy here, artsy titles like this have always, across all mediums, got a disproportional critical appreciation vs more traditional titles.

It's just the same old story. Yes people do like these games. No they are not the majority. Yes you can just ignore it, no it's not a conspiracy.