Tiny Battles: Prologue

"Tiny Battles: Prologue" is isn't a game at all, it's just an ad for [i]Tiny Battles[/i]. Talk about store pollution... Misleading marketing like this is an abuse of the Steam storefront and the "free" category. The product this is advertising, [i]Tiny Battles: Prologue[/i] is a mobile phone tier pixelcrap soldier attack/defense game that's pretty much below the quality level of most Adobe Flash games... but that's not really relevant, because this isn't Tiny Battles, it's just an advert for it! Incorrectly published adverts are harmful.. they take up visibility that should instead be afforded to ethical developers who do the right thing. And it makes it harder for us to find those ethically made games. Valve provides a specific way to handle demos, free trials and advertisments. It is clearly outlined in the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos]Steamworks Documentation for creating Demos[/url]... something I would say is mandatory reading before anyone thinks about abusing Steam Direct. This "developer" either didn't responsibly try to understand Steam, or worse, deliberately and wilfully chose to ignore the correct process just to pollute Steam with for-profit advertising. Either way, this is unprofessional and bad for gamers, and here we are, looking at an advert. The goal here is to get you to spend [b]$5 USD[/b] on [i]Tiny Battles[/i]. I do not recommend you get suckered or reward these kinds of shady, deliberately misleading marketing practices. They're harmful to everyone. Let's look at the price and what kind of value this actually offers gamers. As an advertisement, this is only free in the same way that adverts on Youtube and banner ads in your browser are. This is a game demo that's been dumped on Steam to advertise another Steam store page in the hopes of raking in some cash. Just because advertisements are free, doesn't mean they're worth your time. It's important to understand there's a formal process to create a demo/page for a game which hasn't been followed here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos While it might seem like an innocuous mistake, publishing demos and advertisements as if they are full games is misleading and in some ways harmful. This advertisement is taking up marketing space and visibility that would be better made available to a developer that's done the right thing and created a full game. Instead, that visibility is given over to a demo/advert that's been published incorrectly and is polluting the marketplace. It's unclear if this mistake was made through incompetence or a deliberate intent to mislead gamers. Often developers may choose to incorrectly publish demo/advertisements as separate games as a cheap way to bypass paying Valve for marketing presence on the Steam front page, which may seem clever to them, but it's harmful behaviour and it's not good for gamers. A peak of [b]11 concurrent players[/b] (according to SteamDB) for a "free" game is a disastrous public reception. Out of 130 million potential players here on Steam, almost nobody was interested. Even though this is "free". That level of rejection speaks a lot for the quality of the game. Advertisements and incorrectly published demos don't add +1 to your game collector count, they aren't full games. It's impossible for me to recommend this incorrectly published advertising spam to gamers, you deserve better than adverts.