World Capitals Quizzer

"World Capitals Quizzer" is isn't free, it's paywalled with the full content locked behind DLC. Talk about bait and switch... Misleading marketing on a non-free product is abuse of the "free" section of Steam. This pushes itself as a "free" quiz game about various global political and geographical trivia (like flags, world leaders etc)... but remember, unless you buy the DLC, you don't actually get the full product, making this nothing more than an advertisement. 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 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]$39 USD[/b] on DLC to see the rest of the game. I do not recommend you give into those kinds of shady, deliberately misleading marketing practices. They're harmful to everyone. What do you do in the game? Not much, you have to pay an insane amount of money to unlock all the quizzes... this is basically a scam pretending to be a free game when it isn't. This is not okay. For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static text/images... it might as well be a web page. It's functionally no different from a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC. Let's talk about pricing and the actual 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. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free, that was a dismal public reception. But if you take into account the problems I bring up in this review, it's easy to see why gamers rejected it. 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.