"Colory Engine" is NOT FREE. This is a deceptive attempt to mislead gamers for profit... this is not a working application, just a viewer, and you need to pay TWENTY FIVE DOLLARS to buy this application if you want to use it.
When developers abuse the free section of Steam and mislead gamers with non-free products, for profit, it's harmful to everyone, and highly unethical.
You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality product, this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me.
On the important matter of pricing and value for gamers, there's a lot going on here with monetisation, so this really shouldn't be considered a truly free product because of that.
As an advertisement, this is only free in the same way that adverts on Youtube and banner ads in your browser are. This is just a non-functional demo that's been dumped on Steam to advertise the DLC in 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 an application 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.
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 products 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.
As mentioned, you're expected to pay up $25 USD to unlock basic app functionality. This application should not be considered completely unlocked until you empty your wallet for the developer. This is misleading and predatory pricing on a product falsely marketed as "free".
Even as a free product, this couldn't find an audience. With a peak of [b]only 11 users[/b], it's clear the Steam community took one look and walked away. They literally couldn't pay people to spend time with this.
Given that this advertisement for a crap VR version of MS-Paint won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library?
Nope. There's no up front cost here, but I still feel like I got ripped off, and I didn't even spend any money. That's how bad this is.
