One way in which next-gen consoles will beat out PCs...

When I was growing up, demos were only a PC thing. Aside from borrowing a cartridge from a friend, you really couldn't test out a SNES game; you had to rely on Nintendo Power or some other magazine to tell you if it was worth buying or not. On the flipside, practically every game on the PC worth buying had a demo associated with it; I played the Statue of Liberty level for Deus Ex probably a hundred different times before the full game was even released.

It's weird to see how that paradigm has almost completely reversed itself. Around the time of the Xbox, demo discs started to become the most valuable pack-in with the official Xbox and Playstation2 magazines, and now you can just load up your marketplace in your console and get a demo downloaded in an hour. At the same time, it seems like demos have faded away on the PC to the point where it's a legitimate surprise when a game actually has one.

I guess part of that might be because the console market is somewhat more important than it was 15 years ago, and creating demos for the PC hasn't exactly gotten easier, I guess. (Disconnecting logic and unnecessary systems to cut down on file size often causes a fair amount of problems, if I recall correctly....) Plus I guess with the state of PC ports I figure a lot of publishers would rather ask people to buy the full game rather than discover that there is, yet again, no FOV slider or VSYNC adjustment. Plus with more games shifting to a free-to-play model, there's not much point in making demos of those...

You'd think that, given the state of price pressure on PC games, where everything is sold for ten bucks within a year of its release, PC publishers would be more diligent about using any tool afforded to them to encourage purchases out of the gate.

I'm not necessarily complaining about the lack of PC demos, mind: I just wait until games are super cheap and figure I can afford to occasionally spend 10 bucks on a crappy game if I'm making relatively smart purchases otherwise. I just think it's interesting how demos have completely shifted from being a PC-exclusive thing to almost entirely a console concept at this point. Maybe the next-gen consoles, being so close to standard PC architecture, will encourage more PC demos to launch alongside their console counterparts?

aha

Let's not make this into a discussion on the merits of piracy, thanks.

Demos can basically only hurt you when it comes to sales, that's why they are going away.

Anything a good demo can accomplish a good trailer can do as well, and it's not as hard to execute.

And FYI, I don't like it either.

>_>

I...disagree? I don't see how even a really good trailer can demonstrate the finer points of how a game is actually controlled and played. At their worst, trailers can gloss over a lot of a game's issues.

But why would we need demos when we can just watch Brad die in the quick look?

@rorie: I don't know. They're a little related. During high school, PC demos just dwindled until they died abruptly. So I had to do some things to see how games ran on my system.

I will say though that I think most console games don't have demos either. When the 360 and PS3 came out, demos were way more proliferate than they are now. Besides the downloadable game demos, it seems only the bigger games get demos. I'd say it's due to rising development costs. Studios will find it harder and harder to dedicate time and funds to make vertical slices of their games.

I personally rely on sites like Giant Bomb and friends with similar interests to help decide whether a game is worth owning or not. When I was buying playstation magazine for the demo disk, I did not have access to the internet. I'm guessing the internet has helped facilitate enough communication between like minded individuals to make demos less of a necessity.

I don't know even for console games it seems most times now developers dont release demos until after launch. I think the last demo I downloaded myself was DmC before that...I couldn't even remember the last one I downloaded. Usually my instincts are pretty good when it comes to picking games I enjoy.

For the most part, I don't feel the need to play demos. I usually know if a game is up my alley or not beforehand; and if I know a game is up my alley, I usually try to go in as clean as possible and just experience the full game as it is. Having said that though, I still try to watch all the Quick Looks =/

Also, my computer is good enough that I know I'm not below the minimum requirements for anything. And if there is an issue with the game (lack of cockpit view in Grid 2, for example), it's very likely that someone will come up with some kind of solution.

Edit: 9000 ^__^

@myketuna: I'll clarify: I don't necessarily mind a discussion of piracy in terms of how it might affect the development of demos, but personal admissions of pirating games are gonna get flushed.

You say that - but I think it is a good point that the pirates (I love calling people pirates for some reason) have. Isn't this just the unspoken (or not in this case) truth about the PC?

However the rebuttal to that would be for services like Steam to have the possibility to download a demo on the same page as the actual game, but as you mention, I think the price of PC games and the fact that you can get some games so cheap in sales maybe makes demos pointless on computers. Making a purchase on a console is much more of a financial risk so demos make more sense.

It does also feel as if we are in an age where publishers are much meaner with their content. Back in the day it felt as if you could get some quite meaty demos to enjoy but know they probably look at that content and think 'if this was DLC we would be selling it for £10' and decide not to.

It also might be because sometimes you play a demo and don't buy the game. Demos have to be well made or they can turn people off. I played the demo to Darksiders and thought 'nah this game seems boring,' then bought the game on a whim years later and loved it. You need to get it right rather than just plonk the first level down or whatever and maybe they can't be bothered with this much effort for the return they get. I like to see some figures for sell-throughs on Xbox live or similar.

I dunno, there are a few possible reasons that come to mind. I guess there are a fair few demos that are built for demoing games at trade shows etc that can then easily be released to the public later and those are more likely to be console versions. There's also the requirements Microsoft have on XBLA stuff having a demo. I guess since the demo disc has kind of gone the way of the dinosaur along with most game related print media, maybe this being the first generation of consoles that was really equipped to take advantage of being online was also a factor. They're taking advantage of a new delivery method for them which is nothing new for PC?

It is an interesting point about PC games perhaps having more incentive for front-loaded sales, given the precipitous way in which PC game prices fall, but I dunno, I suppose somebody has to be spreadsheeting away to figure out if it's worth the workload to make a demo when that time could be spend elsewhere. Services like Steam could probably afford to actually better integrate the demo in to their service, like the way PSN/XBLA games will often just let you unlock a trial version to get the full game. Maybe Valve will overhaul things if they try to push Big Picture mode and end up with something more like the PS store or the XBLM.

I dunno, I think the demo has perhaps become less important now with the amount of video coverage out there anyway. I don't really need a demo because I can just check the coverage here. I only really play a demo if it's something I know I want to play and I want to get some time with it before it comes out/before I get around to buying it.

Either way, you've just reminded me that I'm babysitting a pup this week. Puppysitting?

Remember trials? You got the full game for an hour then could pay to unlock the rest? I miss those.

Shareware is a thing of the past. These days every jackass and his brother has a whiny-voiced let's play on youtube. You can just watch the damn game if you only care about the story.

The XBLA/XBLIG rules are awesome (Xbox One unified store = end of that rule?) in both pushing impulse buys and providing a demo for every game (satisfying both the player and developer in me). But I really don't see a lot of demos on the consoles (and some of them seem to appear on the PS+ exclusives list) and I think a major problem for PC players is they don't realise demos are no longer something you find on fileplanet. Some of them are on dev sites and others sit on Steam. There are a lot of gaming missing them (even when we have such great online stores that you can easily make a demo of the opening chapter of a game that saves your progress and offers a quick buy button - with streaming resources then it doesn't take a genius to make it so you can go back and continue playing as the rest of the game downloads; Guild Wars and later WoW pushed for this to be an expected feature in MMOs). That focus on streaming and online may be coming to consoles for the next generation and hopefully the PC sees some of that love reflected in the ports.

Luckily things have progressed in the last 15 years, there is now a much higher chance any remotely modern PC that is patched will run a game thanks to the mature drivers and standardised APIs (not so in the 80s-90s where a game could easily just not work on your PC no matter how much you tweaked the himem in config.sys) and patches are easier to distribute for any edge cases. Even console ports have reached the stage where you can barely tell something is an afterthought port rather than something developed at the same time in house with the same care and attention as the console editions. At least a decent amount of times, there will always be some terrible dodgy work that gets released.

As you say, games are cheap and we're all getting older and able to direct our cashflow to make sure we're never short of a game to play. I think demos are important and every dev should schedule in the time rather than throw the support issues requiring a refund onto their distributor's customer support centre but I've heard a lot of devs making some rather stretched arguments over data that is questionable in correlation and certainly not conclusive in causation about demos on all platforms being a negative for sales.

When it comes to PC gaming, I think the "beta" has effectively replaced the demo. Its benefits are twofold for publishers: 1) it allows developers to tweak their games based on actual user data on a much greater scale than normal testing which results in (hopefully) higher quality games, and 2) it allows publishers to install ways to charge users before the games' actual release, like microtransactions, founders' packs, etc.

I've been using quick-looks and lets plays in the way that I used to use demos. I did enjoy the Injustice demo recently but I downloaded it so I could wait for a decent drop in price.

Nothing wrong with a solid demo though.

@rorie: What if it was about the merits of using a library? EDIT: Ah, I see it was the quotation that probably warranted my deletion.

I think the concept of the availability of a full free product through a local library is excellent. It works for me, so I can try out a full product and decide whether or not to purchase it (and possibly complete it, I only get two weeks to play it with one week rental and one week renewal). Typically, I'll end up getting the PC counter-part for non console exclusives and playing it through that. Yet, this concept only works for non pc exclusive games. But, it still doesn't hurt the pc's chances in my opinion. I feel like there are other outlets that are just as good as demos: quick looks are like demos, aren't they?

Back in the day my parents' computer was loaded with shareware games. I probably played those more than my Nes at the time.

Any excuse to use this dumb picture.

The only negative to demos is that they require some work to produce that is not going into the final product.

I suspect that going forward that instead of a stand alone demo we will see more "1 hour demos" where it is the full game that becomes locked after running for an hour.

I like me some PC demos just so i can get a honest to goodness example of how the game will run on my PC.

Say what you will about Capcom, but they try and put out demos for like every game they can.

Even for stuff like Resident Evil 6 and Lost Planet 2.

This reminds me of the F.E.A.R. 2 Demo, probably the best demo I had ever played.

They took many parts of the actual game, and streamlined several locations and scenarios into one level, even one of the mech sections. It was only after I played the final product that I noticed what they had done, and how genius it was.

F.E.A.R. 2 was a pretty good game, on top of all that. Ghost rape included.

Okay game developers...dont make the puppy sad. A sad puppy makes Rorie sad which in turn depresses the Giant Bomb readers who in turn feel so down about it that they buy less games.

Hence the cycle of ever lessening game sales is born.

I stopped playing demos around the time that I realized that I'm more interested in games for story than for mechanics and around the time I found good resources for game recommendations. A demo might tell me if a game is totally broken (then again, bugs may not carry over to the full version), but aside from that, reviews & word of mouth are much more important to me. Even with an Xbox 360, I rarely bother with a demo of anything that isn't a Live Arcade game.

I never play demos, and don't even play F2P until I've dropped a few bucks in. There's so much video content out there now (like quick looks) that I already know what I want to play. The demo's purpose (for me) is better achieved by watching 5 minutes of footage.

That being said, the last console demo i played was.....

It's not because they arn't available cus they certainly are, i think the quick looks and lets plays of the internet have just rendered them useless to me.

@rorie: I'm only talking about sales, not informing you about the game. I agree that a good demo can really help you decide if you like it or not.

Companies in the business of making money don't want to help you decide to not buy something. This is why demos are going away.

I use a PC for 90% of my games, and I always have, and I don't care about demos at all. At all. So there you go... I guess.

Demos and trials can work against the games they are supposed to be helping to sell but so can any form of marketing, I personally think demos are super important and when done well are usually the difference between me buying a game or not.

With that said it is super annoying that the majority of smaller releases on Steam don't have demos, especially when they are the sort of games that aren't being covered well/at all.

@video_game_king said:

@rorie said:

Let's not make this into a discussion on the merits of piracy, thanks.

Any excuse to use this dumb picture.

thats pretty amazing

At some point though it becomes a math problem for them. Does the amount of sales they might get as a result of a demo outweigh the cost and resources to make one?

I do not see how the lack of PC demos makes a console any more attractive. On the PC games are cheaper, look better, require no fee for online play, and allow me to upgrade the hardware when I choose.

Mainly I rely on word of mouth, quicklooks and the occasional NeoGAF OT when deciding what to play next on the PC.

Very true. The ability to try out a slice of any XBLA game and most of the major releases must have done untold good for game sales, probably bolstering a lot of titles that people might have otherwise overlooked.

This is going to become especially important in the next gen I think, when much like XBLA titles all games will have a demo available because likely all games will be available digitally on release.

Too often have people ended up just hacking through the demo to find that like, the entire game is in there, or there are secrets the developer didn't want put out there.

An OP who minds posts and flushes them on his own thread because he has a flushing button?

Thanks, I won't be posting on your future topics. You can also flush this post, which you probably will because you mind it.

There are lots of demos on steam...

Besides demos stopped being meaningful to me a long time ago, if I want a game I just buy it, with all the information we get nowadays about the games a demo is really not necessary most of the time.

Also the PC will never stop being the superior gaming platform, ever.

I remember playing countless hours of Battlefield 1942 demo, but that was a long time ago, even though there are tons demos available for download on consoles and i have fast unlimited broadband i can't remember the last time i've tried one.

The way the PC market has developed has kinda eradicated the need for demos to a large extent, and not just because of how easy it is to pirate the whole thing (though that's definitely a big part of it).

15 years ago there was a decent chance you'd buy a full price ($50 or whatever) game and have almost no idea what to expect until you actually started playing it. A demo was useful in that case, but how often does that happen anymore? The only full price games nowadays are so risk averse that you know exactly what you're gonna get without needing a demo. I honestly can't remember the last time I was 'on the fence' about a full price game - between the predictability and the insane amount of coverage they get, I can tell if it's something I'll want or not. The unpredictable mid-high budget game doesn't exist anymore, and most of the innovative low budget games are trivially inexpensive anyway.

I usually find the sorts of games I would want a demo of do still tend to have them, and I think the standard and effectiveness of those demos has only improved over the years.

I don't think I've played a demo in about 8 years, console or otherwise and I'm pretty sure steam has a shit ton of demos and has for quite a while.

Demos are an outdated concept really. It's pretty easy to ascertain whether you will enjoy a game or not by watching someone else play a small portion of it, mostly due to the way every game is basically standardized in terms of controls. You pretty much know what it feels like if it's a genre you've experienced before just by association.

At least I find it easy to determine that.

Nintendo could use some work on their demos. When I first got my 3DS I downloaded the demo of Marvel Pinball. Apart from being shocked by the 30 uses limit - which I now know to be on all estore demos, the actual gameplay lasted less then 8 seconds! That's 8 whole seconds of playing the game they allowed to try and convince me to buy their product.

I'm on the fence about Luigi's Mansion. It's not really my normal style of game, but I hear great things. As it's a first party Nintendo game it I'm unlikely to find any store offering it below RRP, so I either need to take a nearly £40 punt on it and hope I like it, or as is currently the case - it will remain on a shelf. A demo may not guarantee that it turns my interest into a purchase, but the lack of one negates even that chance. Same deal with other 3DS titles like Paper Mario or Mario 3D Land.

In all the cases I highlight above, the main reason I want to try them as a demo is so I can gauge the controls. I personally find that 3DS games where the character has full rotational movement can be really frustrating if I can't control the camera. Some are fine with that, and say that games like Resident Evil on the platform handle great. I personally couldn't hack it, and it was thanks to a demo that I learnt that. Quick Looks etc can give me some idea of the quality of a game, or tell me if it is flat out broken. But where opinion is more subjective - like the feel of the controls - only a bit of hands on time can answer that question.

@extomar said:

I really hope not. Time limits are the escort mission of demos.

I also feel game demos are less relevant in this day and age. Giant Bomb does a good job of showing extended gameplay videos, there are also countless numbers of people who live stream games for extended periods of time. I have only made 2 game purchases in the past few years that I regret. Crysis 2 and Sim City.