Rail Route: The Story of Jozic

For an [insert descriptive words here] addict like me, I very much enjoyed this game when filling my timetables full and dispatching every trains on time. Sometimes I even forgot what time it was and played this game for few hours non-stop. It is an excellent demo. 10/10

"Rail Route: The Story of Jozic" is isn't a game at all, it's just an ad for [i]Rail Route[/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]Rail Route: The Story of Jozic[/i] is a mobile app tier railroad simulator with all the nice train graphics removed, leaving a minimalist railroad management sim with a poorly written and badly translated e-book stapled on the front for no clear reason.... but that's not really relevant, because this isn't Rail Route, 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. Instead of following the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos]Official Steamworks Process For Demos[/url], the developer decided to pollute Steam with for-profit advertising. Whether this is deliberate and malicious, or simply ignorance and incompetence, the result is deceptive marketing. This is bad for gamers and bad for genuine developers who do the right thing, because they have to compete for visibility against these misleading advertisements. That's not okay! The "developer" behind this advertisement wants you to drop [b]$25 USD[/b], your money, on the real product. This is a predatory and misleading abuse of the "Free" section of Steam... and we know there's a proper proccess the developer didn't follow. Avoid this unethically marketed junkware and keep your money. Next is pricing and what value this has for 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. In terms of public reception, the "free" price tag didn't help. This peaked at a handful of players and then immediately cratered. With a peak count of less than 50 gamers (out of over 130 million gamers and over 40 million daily logons), it’s safe to say the PC gaming community has collectively decided to ignore this, probably because of the reasons supplied in this review. 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.