By the Vine: Chapter One

"By the Vine: Chapter One" isn't a game. It looks like an e-book dumped on Steam masquerading as a game, but it's not that either! This is an advert! This is just the "try before you buy" intro to some cringe fan-fiction, and the "author" expects you to pay money for the rest... imagine paying money for someone's high school anime club dropout fan-fiction. Ugh. This is never okay. Of course, the author never added any additional chapters to buy.. which is a good thing. This garbage e-book advertisement is written by Christian furries and is a toxic evangelism piece intended to inflict religious doctrine on gamers on Steam. It's my firm belief that religious dogma and political indoctrination has no place on Steam... this is harmful and is intended to prey on the weak minded. And to paraphrase King of the Hill... "This isn't making religion better, it's just making gaming worse". The e-book this is advertising was intended to follow a furry who burns his house down then suffers religious indoctrination. Yeah, ain't nobody gonna read that. As an advertisement for a visual novel, this has no notable gameplay. It's just clicking through badly written, cringey fan-fiction tryhard dialogue that wouldn't be accepted in print by any real book publisher. How did such garbage end up on Steam? When failed authors can't get published in print (and possibly laughed at by publishers), they spend $100 to dump their high school fan-fiction e-book onto Steam under the guise of a game... but this time they made the conscious choice to try mislead gamers with this incorrectly published demo. To prove the author of this garbage e-book and corresponding advertisement is abusing the free section of Steam for the purpose of marketing garbage, here's the correct process that [i]the author deliberately did not follow:[/i] https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos This was slapped together with the godawful Ren'Py visual novel construction kit... enabling terrible authors to publish books as if they were games when otherwise we might have been spared the pollution. So, just like no professional writing took place here, no professional software development took place, either. Visual novels are tedious at best. Imagine the best novel you ever read, be that Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or Twilight (kidding), but translate it to a format where you've to click your mouse for every single sentence instead of just turning pages. You'd think it was garbage. Now imagine that experience with much worse writing. If these guys could write professionally, they'd be in bookstores. They wouldn't have to pay Valve $100 to self-publish this on Steam. But here we are. There's no reason for this to be on Steam when it could just be a webpage... e-books are just a bunch of cringe text and (usually character generator created) static 2D imagery. You don't buy an expensive gaming PC to use it for something your web browser can do for free. Despite having no cost, this failed to appeal to gamers. SteamDB shows it peaked at only 2 concurrent readers. This is a dismal public reception. They couldn't even give it away. To satisfy the global demand for this book, you'd only ever need to print 2 copies. This isn't a game and it's not even a complete book. It's a badly made advertisement for fan-fiction. E-books aren't games, and neither are advertisements. You deserve better than being advertised to. These taking up space on the store is harmful to real developers who make real games.