Stream Basketball is really a symptom of some of the worst of gaming and game development. In fact this garbage barely counts as a game, it's not meant to be played as one. Speaking of not playing games, this is basically an addon for the game streaming platform Twitch, that allows your viewers to stop watching you and instead type commands which fling a 2D basketball at a 2D hoop while they chat. That's right, the purpose of this crapware is to add a method to Twitch to stop viewers from viewing your stream so they can play a really crap Adobe Flash tier basketball programming tutorial reject instead. Seriously, that's how bad this is. Jesus wept.
This unfinished Twitch addon was abandoned roughly a month after launch and hasn't been updated in about a year. It blew past the developers commitment to complete the Twitch addon without any notification or admission of failure from the developer. The Twitch addon will never be completed.
The poor quality of this Twitch addon is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 2 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality Twitch addon is to be expected.
Unethically, the developer sold keys to this abandoned Early Access Twitch addon into cheap, nasty game bundles, where they knew it would be advertised and sold as a complete PC game. This seems to have been done in an attempt to mislead gamers into buying a knowingly faulty, defective and incomplete product. When a developer does this for a Twitch addon they have zero practical intention of completing, this is essentially a scam, an intention to get paid for a broken/unfinished product. Often this is done as an exit strategy, as the developer takes the money and runs. No refunds have been given, the developer kept all the money they took from gamers.
Another unethical act of this developer, knowing full well that this Twitch addon is abandoned and they will never complete it, they are deliberately trying to scam gamers into buying it by offering it on discount and selling keys to the Twitch addon from third party key resellers. It's impossible to "accidentally" discount a Twitch addon. The developer looked at their abandoned Twitch addon, and instead of doing the right thing and removing it from Steam, they instead doubled-down and tried to scam even more people into paying for it. Greedy, and completely unethical. Doing the wrong thing, on purpose, for money. This is not okay.
So, should you buy this Twitch addon? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Stream Basketball has the preposterous price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the unethical nature of the developer.
For comparison, the $5 asking price for this Twitch addon could get you games like "Left 4 Dead 2", "Torchlight 2" or "Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
Profile Features Limited!
Valve have marked this Twitch addon as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the Twitch addon (to date). Until this status changes, this Twitch addon will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this Twitch addon.
