Resident Evil 8's time limited demos further expand live service/FOMO manipulation tactics spreading in gaming

Resident Evil 8 is getting some demos, starting tomorrow, and man does it suck. These demos are not only limited to 30 or 60 minutes of gameplay, but they are available to play during extremely short time windows; 8 hours for the PS4 exclusive demos on April 17th and 24th, and 24 hours for the all platforms demo on May 1st.

As someone who played the heck out of certain demos over and over as a teen...I hate this. A good demo can be a source of real joy for a kid with nothing better to play at the moment, and playing one over and over can build a lot of hype for the main game. Time limiting the demos to 30 minutes is frustrating but understandable, because you don't want people playing them to death and sucking all the juice out of the mechanics, but making them available for such short periods is just awful.

More and more it seems like gaming is focused around limited time events and FOMO. Seasons in live service games. Nintendo's B.S. around Super Mario 3D All-Stars and Fire Emblem. Now demos that are only available for 8 hours. What if you have to work? Or take care of a kid? Or you just aren't feeling well? Or you like to play Resident Evil during the day because it gives you bad dreams? Too bad, you missed out, move along.

It's one thing to do this with server based betas, or when the demo window is like a whole weekend or a couple weeks. That's fine and makes sense. But these tiny little windows just suck. They're designed to get everyone talking about something all at once, which I get, but it's Resident Evil 8. It doesn't need that kind of cheap manipulation tactic.

I know people will say "this is a free demo, they can do what they want" and it's true. P.T. was also a free demo. But this stuff doesn't stay locked up in free demos forever. There are already lots of games where you have time limited events that don't need to be time limited. Immortals: Fenyx Rising had one as promotion for some Netflix show.

More and more games and marketing are moving to this time limited miss it and its gone mentality, and as someone who cares about preservation and also likes to play old stuff, I really really hate it. What if someone wants to look back at this demo in 10 years and write or do a video about it? Hope they have the foresight to play it tomorrow during the 8 hour window!

Well that sucks. What happens if the servers goes down for most (if not all) of those 8 hours?

I wasn't going to play these demos but this kind of behavior makes me want to stay away, not the intended effect I assume.

@firepaw: First of all you can preload the demo so people can download before they play. Secondly if there was something like a server outage and people couldn't download I assume Capcom could extend the demo with a slight tweak or update, or open a new window.

The real issue is for people for whom it's not convenient to play the demo during the specific period Capcom says you can. This is a free product so it's hard to complain, but as I said it happens a lot with paid content too.

Probably shouldn't have come as a surprise when they already had a limited demo for RE2, that I think you could originally play only between certain dates, but it is still incredibly dumb for sure, even if (or because) it's meant as some marketing scheme.

I suppose it's still better than paying for your demo like with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 and Crash 4, but still hardly a good idea. Really, just put out your demo for people to play for as long as they want. I'm pretty sure that will still get you new customers.

Moreover, a demo should be something they're showing off to entice more people to play the game, not an incentive unto itself (as glots mentions above with lunatic marketing like "paid demos") and seems more like something that a larger indie game would do to drum up some excitement around a game or give people a first glimpse that could end with some kind of hook.

But Resident Evil 8 is already incredibly anticipated and has a really strong online presence with people on social media coming to the shocking realization that sometimes women are taller than 5'3" and that some of them really dig it, so this just seems doubly, or even triply, needless.

I might just be a dog with silly theories but doing the demo this way might allow
Capcom to funnel the influencers to stream the demo during certain times
which will give them the ability to brag about concurrent stream numbers.
And when people not too deep into the business will see all of twitch is streaming RE8
they might just think "Holy crap, this game must be amazing, I should buy it now!"
It's not a demo for us, it's a PR campaign disguised as a demo.

On PC I do believe there are ways of blocking/removing restrictions as was done
on RE7 and 2 Remake but that's not much of a band-aid.

This is what I think. A limited time demo like this makes no sense unless this is the goal.

It's definitely all about focusing social media engagement into a narrow period so that REVIII can be seen as "driving the conversation" or w/e for a period of time. So it's less about FOMO and more about creating a marketing blitz, I think.

Oh wow, I knew about the in game time limits but I had no clue about the demo's themselves being only available for an extremely limited amount of time. I already knew I was going to get RE8 sooner or later, it's just been a question of "can my rapidly aging PC run it decently enough?" so I was looking forward testing that out with the demo....which just so happens is going to be on a very busy Saturday for me already. Honestly the whole time limited thing that's caught on over the past years, be it a limited time event in games, battle passes, or Nintendo just arbitrarily stopping selling games....it makes me yearn for the days of the barely disguised gambling that is loot boxes.

The shitty marketing deal they have with Sony is also to blame as well. I get it. They're advertising the game. But these times demos are pathetic.

By the time demo comes out on pc and xbox. The game is less than 6 days away. Pointless

Also a timed 30 min demo for what is a atmospheric horror game is just ridiculous.

Very frustrating. Saw the demo up last night, downloaded it, and noooope, can't play it until Capcom says so. I mean, I'm going to get the game, but still, I'm not downloading tickets to an event or trying to get into a beta server test, I'm downloading a small slice of single player game that'll be out next month.

Modern gaming is fucking weird, man.

I understand what everyone is saying about social media engagement and streamers. It's what I meant when I said that the demo timing was designed to get everyone talking about the game all at once. But there are other ways to do that.

As for the demo itself, I played it and came away thinking that this is not a game I need to play at launch. It looks alright but not super incredible for a 9th gen game, and I basically spent 10 minutes killing all the enemies I could find on the map and then not being able to figure out what to do next and wandering around until the timer expired. The creepy atmosphere was alright, but the combat sucked. It was both too hard and too easy at once. Too hard because enemies are bullet sponges who can take a bunch of head shots in a row. Too easy because if you lure the enemies into a bottleneck where they can only attack one on one and then use blocking and the knife you can easily dispatch them (which I did.) The game also pauses in the crafting menu for some reason, which I don't think a horror game should (it should let you pause, of course, but not do crafting while you're paused.)

But mostly I just wasn't in the mood to play Resident Evil last night and that made me not enjoy it like I might have. That's another downside of the timed demo.

Capcom thought they were clever by making the RE 8 demo 8hrs well 8 days would of been the same. I liked the how they did the RE 7 demo way more they added new areas with each update, it had a unique puzzle that wasn't in the main game (I spent so many hours solving that dummy finger puzzle), you played as the Camera man from the tape not the main character, it had an different ending, you got something for finishing the demo with the true ending that you could use in the main game, and the best part NO time limit I still have the demo installed and can play it any time. I won't be playing the other demos cause I don't want spoilers I only watched the announcement trailer and avoided everything else. As a huge RE fan that teaser demo that let you just walk around is all I needed. The combat in the demo was not great mostly the pistol felt weak and the gun shots sounded lower then 7 the shotgun was a little better. If you have a time limit don't have cutscenes in it or stop the clock at least, the part in the house with the survivors felt like it was 10min long so by the time I was escaping the burning building with the girl it ended. All in all I enjoyed what I saw and the biggest disappointment for me was that it doesn't have VR (so far) I only played 7 in VR so it felt weird to be playing a first person RE game even though that was what 7 was if that makes any sense. It is too late now but for the next 2 demos if you want to play more then one time just create a couple PSN accounts then log in as different users.

@bigsocrates: you needed to find the two crests to get through a large door. The building where you find the first crest had a letter with a map showing you where the other crest was. You just had to wander beyond that area with those monsters in the cornfield to get to it.

@permanentsigh: I found the door and one of the crests, I was just tired when I played it so I'm sure I missed something obvious. Which brings me back to my point about the short time window. I would have much rather played it fresh in the morning than at 11 PM at night but that's not possible because of the shitty promotional tactics.

My main issue with the demo wasn't that I personally didn't find the item, but that I didn't like the combat. I get that it's survival horror, but pumping a bunch of rounds into a monster's head only to have it not die is not enjoyable, especially when I can then easily cheese that monster by going into a building and fighting hand to hand. It's not scary or intense it's just laborious.

I also think that the main character's voice acting was bad. The other voice actors seem better but I thought he was very wooden. I realize that's a Resident Evil tradition, but given how much they've changed about the games by moving into first person and away from the ol' T virus zambies you'd think they could do away with that too.

@bigsocrates: I assume you didn't like Ethan's voice acting and the bullet sponge monsters in RE7 either?

@permanentsigh: Never got around to RE 7. The Village setting and aesthetic are much more appealing to me, with some cool Castlevania vibes, so I was thinking of playing 7 before 8 launches if the demo grabbed me. It did not, so I'll just wait for a sale.

I wonder if the timed demos is something pushed by Sony considering the heavy marketing deal they have with RE8. They must have been pissed off they couldn't get the game as an exclusive so doing everything they can to push these nonsense demos out of Capcom.

Doesn't matter to me. Will buy the game on the 7th. For xbox.

Has there been any other demos as badly pulled off as this one? I'm sure there have been other timed or exclusive demos through out last gen, I just can't remember any of them.

Played the US demo this morning because it was still active in my time zone (what a dumb thing). Certainly felt more like RE7, so if that's what you're looking for, you'll probably like this. Goes the other way too, so if you didn't enjoy seven at all (gameplay especially), you can probably skip this.

Game looked fantastic on PS5 and ran smoothly, but I was reminded of the aiming being kinda painful to me in the newer RE games, which is why I changed to PC for the RE3 Remake. So I'm going to give the full demo a try on PC too and if that version runs good, that's probably how I'll play the full game.

It's so strange how much of a time and money sink it all sounds like, despite PROBABLY being true. The games industry marketing machine is a snake eating its own tail: they'll pour ludicrous resources into a game that ALREADY HAS a ton of hype behind it, then use that to show how much marketing can help a game.

But then something like PUBG, Fortnite, or even Stardew Valley comes out of almost literally NOWHERE and takes the world by storm with ZERO marketing, and the industry at large learns NOTHING from their examples.

Disagree, OP.

I think this multi-stage event-like demo is quite effective and it is absolutely harmless compared to the actual predatory practices in the industry.

It does not want to sell me anything except the full game and as already mentioned: it's quite effective at that as an almost curated introduction to the game.

@cptbedlam: Nobody is claiming that this is the worst practice the industry engages in. That being said, I don't see the argument that it's "only" trying to sell you the main game. It's still trying to emotionally manipulate people with FOMO and feeling left out to get them to pony up cash. Is that as bad as manipulating you into gambling for bullshit digital items? It's not. But it's not good.

I don't really understand the argument about it being effective at creating a "curated" introduction to the game. All demos do that. Nobody is arguing that they shouldn't release a demo. It wouldn't be less "curated" if you could play it whenever you wanted.

hello, welcome to the modern Resident Evil era of survival horror, stretching all the way back to RE Revelations, where survival and horror both just mean "is this thing dead yet? I don't know. I'm not sure. I keep shooting it but there is no real pattern to be had. is this fun? I don't know. I've shot this thing in the head a lot, or at least I think it's the head, it's jerking around quite a lot and it's sort of hard to tell where my bullet actually went."

That's it. That's what was written in the design doc, I think.

The biggest names don't need marketing. You can argue that in many cases, brands have become big and successful due to memorable and effective marketing campaigns. But I believe that at a certain point, it becomes self-sustaining. Call of Duty doesn't need to market itself.

I can't stand marketing that tries to sell the thing that people already know. The one example of this that pisses me off (I admit, it annoys me to an irrational degree) is Coke products advertised in movie ttheaters. I'm sitting I'm my seat waiting for the movie to start. I have already purchased snacks. I already have a drink, which is a Coke product, even if it's not soda because those are literally the only options available! I don't want to sit through a 45-second commercial for a product everyone watching has already purchased! It makes no sense and has no effect on purchasing behavior.

I honestly believe that advertising budgets are inflated to give the people making advertisements more money, when that stuff could get reduced significantly and have the same effect. Of course there's no real way to ever verify this idea.

Looks like Capcom realizes this was a bad idea and has changed things up for the non-platform exclusive demo.

That, obviously, makes things much better. I still think limiting the amount of time you can play and putting a window on it is kind of silly, but making it accessible for a full week means most people will be able to give it a chance.

I watched both parts on Twitch and both seemed so incredibly linear that I don't think you can even call it a demo. You wander around a bit, look at how pretty it is, and then you shoot a few enemies that don't really pose any kind of a challenge. I feel like I missed absolutely nothing by watching a playthrough rather than playing it myself. There is nothing there that they couldn't have shown at E3 for instance.

This thing is obviously just a marketing stunt. It has absolutely nothing to do with the demos of the 90s that would often feature a full level of gameplay, where you actually had something to play. I remember playing some demos over and over again back in the days, yet here even 30 minutes of watching this thing got boring towards the end. And it being on console, there's no danger that your system is not powerful enough to run the final game. And of course, back in the 90s it was not possible to watch playthroughs of games on the Internet.