Ashina: The Red Witch: Prologue

"Ashina: The Red Witch: Prologue" is not a game, it's an advertisement for an asset flip... I know you might think it's an RPG Maker asset flip, because it sure looks like it, but you'd be wrong! Because this is an asset flip made with assets stolen from the even-worse-than-RPG-Maker "Adventure Game Studio" instead. Glad we cleared that up. Anyway this isn't even that asset flip, it's just an advertisement for it, which is even more disgusting. This has negative value for gamers just by existing... it's non game spam, polluting Steam and the product it's advertising is even worse. 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 inocuous 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. It's important to note that, despite this being such a low quality product, there's a number of positive reviews that all appeared immediately after the advert launched, from suspiciously inactive Steam accounts that have reviewed almost no other games apart from this. On a purely unrelated note, recent US FTC rulings mean that review manipulation and fake reviews are now federal crimes. Interesting, isn't it? Regardless... take the review score of this advert with a grain of salt. Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? Nope. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.