Now, I don't mean this to go anywhere into a debate about piracy, but I wish more developers would make game demos. There hasn't been many games that I downloaded the demo for that I didn't actually buy - it's like an advertisement that people want because its free. You can tailor the demo to highlight the best parts of your game, and you can hook in a lot of customers, it really pays off.

Hell, even multiplayer games should get a demo. Ironically, though, some multiplayer demos have gotten so popular they still have a big player base years later - the Halo Trial demo has thousands of players and there are even dedicated Halo trial clans....the Battlefield 2 Demo also has a lot of players.

Let me tell you about a personal experience with the Halo trial demo. Me and a couple of friends used to play Halo online together, and we wanted to play with a lot more people. So we told them all to get the Halo trial (they wouldn't buy the game on their own, normally), and for a few months we had 16 player matches online filled with people everyone knew in real life. After the same old Blood Gulch CTF got old more than half of them bought the actual game so we could have access to all the game modes and maps. Without the trial being available Microsoft would have lost out on potential customers.

Yeah I agree 100% I would love to see demo`s for some of the more unknown games out there.
There are alot of games which just come out of the dark and don`t make any profit since they hadn`t advertised but a demo would have done them good.

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That would be nice.But guess what,A star wars force unleashed demo is coming out this thurstday.

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The game is only for the consoles, though >_>

I agree 100% with this topic also....

I remember the demo's of old on the atari and amiga platforms where demo's would come on floppy disks on most of the computer magazines bout 2 months before the actual game was released. I always used to look forward to playing all these demos every month and actually used to be one of the main attractions why i would buy a computer magazine. There was a couple demo disks that used to give you a special level/game that you actually wouldn't find on the actual game which was so freaking awesome, an example of this was the sensible soccer games from Amiga Format, one of the demos was called Sensible Moon, where you'd play 1 match with a 0-gravity like pitch and the ball would just float! aswell was a lemons and pears! demo. There was another demo for Cannon Fodder 1, where the level was on a football pitch and you were shooting soccer players.

The problem today is not only do a lot of developers not release some kind of demo for their games, but whenever these gaming developers finally DO! release a demo for their games, its nearly 90% most of the time 3 or 4 months AFTER the game has been released, and, in my opinion, that is just absolutely useless! You dont release a demo AFTER the game has actually been released, you want to play a demo before so you know if you want to buy that game apon its release.

I've also seen many many game developers have started releasing multiplayer demo's instead aswell, take for example the Red Alert 3 thats currently out, thats multiplayer only, and though that's kind of kool, you have to be online in order to play some of these demos now, which can still restrict you in playing because these demos are based on how fast your broadband is, which for regular home users broadband is still pretty slow unless you start to pay out a lot a month for it.

Some of the issues these days is just the pure size of some of these games/demos. Their becoming so big, that games are on multiple DVDs now, 7/8/9 GB in size, for example my Unreal tournament 3 game is 12GB, Flight Sim X takes up 18GB, making a compressed demo of games such as these can make them incredibly huge, which restricts demos because they either wont fit on Demo DVDs unless you only have like 2 Demo's a disk, or their just simply too big, you can only download them which can take awhile.... for example, i think the World In Conflict demo was 2.2GB in size, and that was just the demo, which i think was released after launch.

Its a complicated subject to be honest but i do agree that we, as players, NEED demos, I actually haven't bought a PC Gamer magazine in over 2 years now which i have to say, was mainly due to the lack of content on the disks which the price they charge to HAVE that disk with the magazine. If game developers make demos, then all i ask is that they release the demo BEFORE! the game is actually released, release a demo after is just dumb in my opinion as you'll already know what the games like when its released with videos and youtube and be no need to play the demo, you'll know if you'll want it or not by then.

If developers made games with a demo in mind I'm sure they could build it so that they could isolate the demo level with not too much overhead. I think the large size of these demos could be attributed with the fact that to just display this tiny bit of content in the game you need to have all these components that are dependent on other components, so on so forth.

yes very true... which is what i was kinda hinting at, that demos, might just not be seemed as practical these days as they used to be years ago with game developers....

but i would still love to see demos no matter their size just as long as their released b4 the actual game ships...

Demos are a must. I don't care if it's an open world game, neither do I give jack arse if it costs to make a demo. You don't buy a pair of pants before trying them on do you? What if it's too thin at the waistline, too tight at the thighs? We have to know what we're getting into. If your game is a dialogue filled RPG, include dialogue in the demo.

One problem with demos nowadays is that they only show off combat. It was a refreshing change of pace when I played the Penumbra: Black Plague demo. At first I needed a walkthrough, I wondered what the Hell was going on. Then I realised.. if it makes sense to do something in real life, it makes sense in Penumbra. Good demo, and a game I'll be picking up shortly.

I think bandwidth is the main concern here, as the last couple demos I remember downloading were at least a gig in size, usually 1.8 gigs or something like that.

"I think bandwidth is the main concern here, as the last couple demos I remember downloading were at least a gig in size, usually 1.8 gigs or something like that."