what ever happened to demos?

Remember when all xbla games had to have a demo? That was really great. Really encouraged me to try/buy weirder more original games. I really really miss that. Thoughts?

Agreed, demos were nice. In fact, when I saw my buddy download a Fight Night demo for free on a whim, I realized the 360 was the future.

It's especially useful with 2D indie games. Since I get angry when a game hides crappy mechanics behind a fancy artstyle, it would be very handy to me to see how a game controls. When I buy a 2D game these days, within 30 seconds I'll know if I made a good choice or not. A bad choice puts me off from taking risks in the future.

PS4 has a fair number of demos. I had to dig around in the free part of the store to find them, but there are some pretty new releases (Trackmania Turbo, Naruto).

They're called betas now. Most betas these days aren't betas; a beta of a game is something that is feature complete that you can play through from start to finish in its entirety. They just have tweaks and bugs that need to be worked on.

My guess for video game marketing ditching the term demo and using the word beta, is because there's a sense of entitlement with a demo. As a consumer a demo should be freely available to everyone. But if they called it a beta, they can lock it behind pre-orders or beta sign-ups.

Remember when all xbla games had to have a demo?

They don't now? I remember when I could play online for free on my PlayStation... :/

When XBLA was created during original Xbox days, there was an obvious divide on what games qualified as a major full priced game like the Halo games and super light and simple games like Hexic. Something like a trial sort of made sense. XBLA, and PlayStation Network's unnamed yet similar counterpart, began to grow in games as well as game scale. Before you had Symphony of the Night and eventually you ended up with Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, The Walking Dead Season One, etc. Microsoft nor Sony just kept the regulation of having a trial period there up until this gen. They probably seen that trials are less common and people are more prone to just paying for something upfront.

As for actual demos, it's probably been irrelevant probably because of the same reason. Less demo downloads and more just getting the game. Also maybe developers don't have the time to create public demo builds anymore.

Also I never had any entitlement with a demo. As for availability, demos were never intended to be free anyways. It's just the times that change its nature.

What do you mean? Demos were almost always free. What's changed is that "betas" are now often being used as a tool to drive preorders.

Demos used to be bundled in with magazines which you had to pay for. Remember magazines?

@thephantomnaut: wha? Ever heard of shareware?

Well if we are talking about recent times sure. But as I said availability varied throughout the years. Sometimes there would be those sampler discs you would get for free in a Toys R Us and such or through a paid subscription like the PlayStation Underground or many print publications.

I will agree that betas are marketing driven though.

I will consider that but still, demo availability varied throughout the years.

Demos were free since the shareware days. In the instances of them being on physical media, you would have to cover the manufacturing costs. But most publishers covered that in their promotional budget, and would give away floppies/CDs freely.

Some demos that required significant development time (in some cases where areas/characters/etc. were not seen in the final game), publishers would charge a small amount to recover those costs.

Maybe if magazines were still a thing. I have like +20 demo discs for my PC, which sadly aren't as easy to play as console demos. Otherwise I totally would've made my own Demo Derby.

At least Steam has refunds. Not really the best solution, but eeeeh...

I did consider shareware in a previous reply. Still demos were not freely available for a bit of time. Nowadays, sure it should be shared for free to everyone especially with how easy it is to grab it. Unfortunately, the demo concept is not prevalent anymore, at least at a major scale, since publishers don't seem to care as much.

Never cared for demos. I get way more information out of a quick look than I ever did a demo. I remember playing the demo for spec ops the line and thinking it was just another shit cover shooter but then heard the GB guys talking about how good the story was. Really glad I didn't pass on that game because of a bad demo.

I remember way too goddamn much about the Bioshock demo and how it's version of the first level differed from the first level of the final game. Oh, and the Ratchet and Clank demo that was on the disc that came with my PS2 back when I was AdequatelyPrepared Jr..

I think that people just don't see the point in creating a demo anymore in this world of streams and neverending gameplay videos on any major new release. Though betas have in part replaced the classic demo, they're really only for MP games.

Currently, the number of players that play a demo of a game compared to the game's sales is rarely more than 2% and sometimes less than 0.5%. Demos are also obviously not guaranteed to result in a sale (in fact, some data suggest that, on average, demos lose as many sales as they gain). So even a decent 2% demo engagement rate is not as good as 2% extra sales. All this means that from the publisher's perspective, the benefits of demos are typically slim to nil.

It generally only makes sense for publishers to pay for demos when the cost happens to work out to be very low (e.g. being able to recycle a demo already made for press events, combining a demo with a stress test that they needed to do anyway, etc.) and/or they feel the game is both high quality and sells itself well immediately upon playing it. Even then, they may decide that their money is better spent on other forms of marketing that are more likely to yield sales.

Another major factor working against demos is that there is no shortage of high quality totally-free games to play, like there was many years ago and especially before free-to-play took off. If someone's bored nowadays, why play a demo, which is only a fraction of a game, when you can play any of an uncountably large number of whole games that are free?

Finally, people generally only play demos for games they already know about, meaning they've already been reached by the game's other marketing efforts (so, as a publisher, why not spend more money on that?). When players do play a demo, it's often to see if the game is safe to buy (is it as fun as the hype/marketing/word of mouth makes it out to be, does it run well on my hardware, is it buggy, does it have any pet peeves of mine, etc.). In other words, demo players are usually looking for reasons not to buy the game.

I'm curious as to what you mean by this? I've been playing PC games since the mid to late 80's, and even in the earliest days of shareware, local BBS operators, and later Software Creations BBS, shareware (usually full games & programs, not demos) and game demos were free. Of course not everyone had a modem or later internet access, but they were still free. Publishers even encouraged people to share their shareware and demos freely by uploading them to a BBS or copying discs and giving them to friends.

The main reason you don't see demos much these days is that the conversion numbers (demo players buying the game) generally don't support the notion that demos have any significant positive impact on sales and if anything are often detrimental to sales and are a waste of development time and resources. It's far easier for developers and publishers to just give Youtubers and streamers free keys for the final game ahead of release as that tends to drive far more awareness and sales than a demo ever could.

Demo's hurt sales when the game is bad. You can still find them on all platforms, but you better believe the publisher believes in that games ability to sell regardless.

I was specifically mentioning console demos where it was common to subscribe to services such as the PlayStation Underground, Official PlayStation Magazine, Official Xbox Magazine, etc. They were the major outlets to try out the newest games for that console generation, hence "for a bit of time." There were free demo discs in places but the demos provided were either already found in an older demo disc from OPM and such.

@shindig said:

I think most people's way to try out the first Metal Gear Solid demo (Japanese VO, English captions) was either getting a PlayStation back in late 1998 or buying an issue of Official PlayStation Magazine around that time too.

The real answer is YouTube.

There's a good video about why demos aren't really beneficial from a business perspective.

Demos are now mislabeled as betas, and used as a tool to drive preorders.

Always a surprise to see new demos on the Xbox One. I think maybe it could be that development schedules are so tight these days that demos aren't a priority compared to the actual game itself.

As others have stated, demos cost money and have a pretty low return rate of actual purchases.

On the other hand, why put out a demo when you can put out an unfinished product for $60? People are going to pre-order your shit anyway. And if your game sucks and people get pissed, just hire some marketing puke to blather on Twitter about how "We're listening!" and "Your feedback is important!" until another company releases something equally broken and everyone forgets about you.

What about SP games?

And while we're at it, there's a distinct lack of Multimedia CD-ROM Experiences these days. It's time for a new edition of Microsoft Cinemania, the easiest way to read thousands of reviews and watch 15 second Quicktime clips in glorious 80x60 resolution!

... Err, I mean, I too miss the heyday of demos and shareware. I also miss physical, boxed releases of shareware games, so I'm clearly fundamentally broken and am much fonder of truncated gaming experiences and product packaging than is healthy.

I can't really think of a demo that sold me on a game that I wasn't already going to buy. Mostly they just kinda closed the deal for me.

I think the internet has proved you only need a few pre-launch extended gameplay videos and some critics/streamers saying some good things to increase interest in your game. Hell, people probably preorder games on much less information.

Quite true honestly. I feel with the amount we see before a game is even out now is enough to make a choice. Its quite easy for me to know what games will appeal to me off developers and previews alone.

I'm really disappointed that Oculus were talking a big game about demos coming back with their store. That you couldn't really even do screenshots and definitely not videos for VR, plus some people just don't get on with some VR stuff because of biology issues. That VR needed a demo feature for games and experiences to show you what you were buying. How seamless that would be from downloading a game to playing the demo to being able to buy the full version from inside that demo experience inside VR. It sounded like the return of XBLA (and the reason why every game was forced to have a demo for that store was a similar note that this would allow the system to self-police against scams and quality issues because every experience would have someone taste before they pay - download the full thing and play it as a demo before you buy, instant upgrades on purchase).

But, looking at the Oculus store... nope. None of that messaging seems to have made it to the final product. Experiences don't have demos in general. Steam is just as bad (but then Steam has always been pretty lousy with demos and can't even consistently put them in the same place: some are their own app with a slot in the store and others have a demo option inside the store page for the full game). Of course, with Steam every game does now effectively have a demo because within 2 hours of play you're basically given a no-quibble option to refund a purchase. But that seems like a low effort but poorer option to actual authored demos from developers who offer either a shortened tutorial or specific flow though sample levels to give a slice of the game for people to see how it handles without giving away the full game.

Most games have a MP mode, even if it doesn't belong, as a way to incorporate microtransactions in the form of burn cards, XP doublers, cosmetic bullshit, etc. For games that don't, I think the publishers are seeing demos as an inefficient way to garner interest. Like others have said, sending the game out to LPers on Youtube probably has a much bigger impact.

Oh man, I remember download tons of demos in the early days of PS3. Played that Motorstorm demo for so long.

When I watched the Factorio quick look I thought the game looked neat, but I wasn't sure I would enjoy actually playing it. I saw there was a demo and after playing for an hour and feeling totally hooked, I bought the game immediately. I would have waited for a sale, but the demo sold me on it for full price.

So needless to say, I appreciate when a developer puts a demo out. It will either sell me on the game or save me the trouble of asking for a refund when the game isn't something I enjoy. Whether or not that's worth it for a developer financially is a whole different matter.

Demos were awesome. I loved getting demo discs and was honestly the only reason why I bought/subscribed to certain gaming mags back in the day. Now demos are just used to get people to pre-order a game, and the word "demo" has been scrubbed and replaced with BETA instead, even though it is rarely and actual BETA. The last time I can remember playing an honest-to-god demo was early last-gen before all of the DLC nonsense started. Can't remember which game it was. Something on PSN.

Ouch. Sad but true. Just like the DLC I mentioned above, we did it to ourselves. "Unintended consequences" for sure.