demo vs no-demo

[Poo Bear]

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I think NOT having a free demo is a really overt and nasty example of capitalist exploitation (I'm looking at you Starcraft2) - sorry but this is one thing I've noticed is on the increase and I really don't like it. Nintendo resisted demos for a long time, then quietly did a test with demos of WorldOfGoo and a few other games and then even more quietly removed the demos.

If you give a free demo then people can see for themselves whether they want it or not. If you don't have a demo, but DO have a big enough marketing / hype budget then you can sell more, because people who do not actually want your product will buy it because of the hype inflating their expectations.

I think it demonstrates a contempt for the player. It should never be acceptable or desirable to make money from people who actually do not want what you sell.

To be fair there is one acceptable rebuttal. If you give a player something for nothing (a demo) then they have less commitment to exploring everything it has to offer and are more likely to dismiss it. If a player has invested in something then they are more likely to commit to it and invest the time needed to begin to master it and extract all the goodness from it. The easiest way to get someone to commit to something is to make them pay for it.

There is also a more practical explanation, that I like less, but is reasonable. If you let people play a 60min demo then a large percentage will extract 60mins of fun from the experience and be adequately satisfied at that. Those people would have happily played for many hours, but don't feel any deep compulsion to do so and therefore will be happy with just a demo. The end result is a lot of lost sales to people who would have enjoyed playing - they aren't fanatics by any means, but could have had a good few hours of fun if the hype had been allowed to lure them in.

[Weeble]

I've heard one reasonable argument against unrestricted demos for games with a significant multiplayer component - if you have a demo with unrestricted access to the multiplayer parts it will be a massive vector for gold-spammers and phishers and other nefarious types who will prey on or just annoy your legitimate players, but if you place too many restrictions on demo players to prevent this they will have a frustrating and unrepresentative experience. That's one reason for limited refer-a-friend schemes - it's much harder for bad guys to create huge numbers of throwaway accounts.

[Rup]

There is the cost / benefit too: Starcraft is going to sell anyway, and once it's sold enough it might get by on word-of-mouth, or even just word-of-mouth from the beta. It takes development effort to strip a game down to a demoable size and test etc. They can't use the full install for a restricted playtime demo as you do because it's a 7-8 GB download.

I haven't been following this - I don't know if a demo's coming later or not. I'm certainly guilty of buying games on name alone sometimes.

[Poo Bear]

[Poo Bear]

[Konedima]

[Poo Bear]

Credit to Microsoft, I love all the demos on X360. I must have filled that 40Gig hard drive up 5 times over downloading all the arcade and xna demos.

[Konedima]