Bug-Filled Demos Are Game Anti-Marketing?

Thanks to GamersWithJobs for their piece discussing early, bug-filled releases of videogame demos (actual link here, broken website referrals currently in effect.) The author points out that if the downloader "...doesn't like the demo, the player will probably skip the game which will hurt the publisher in the end. That makes me really wonder why some of them appear to insist on early trial versions." He concurs that sometimes PC demos are 'leaked' from magazine cover-discs, but wonders "why such a poor representation of a product would be released anywhere in the first place", and concludes: "I tried to understand the reasons for the release of rather 'flawed' demos, but short term gains such as marketing deals or market timing are usually clearly outweighed by the overall consequences."

Comments

Link weirdness...

[Vaevictis666]

the link from the article brought me to a /. mirror of an older article on GWJ about the HL2 code leak... But it's the same URL as what I get from GWJ's main page - maybe they're filtering referrer-from slashdot?

Re:Some but not all games

[GigsVT]

I experienced the same thing with the Carmageddon II demo. Once you tweaked the config file to let you play more than 15 minutes, it was nearly as good as the full game.

I bought the full game, but by the time I got the package in the mail, I wasn't very hot on playing anymore. I played the full game for a while, but nearly all the cool stuff was already played out in the demo (crazy jumps and crashes). The game really was just the physics engine and incredible car damage model, after that, it's just a matter of getting different cars to jump and smash in the full game.

well, actually

[Joe the Lesser]

I think the bigger problems these days is bug filled releases, not demos.

Remember MOO3? The AI was so buggy, it couldn't win even if you never did anything.

Definitely!

[Tom7]

Yeah, I agree. There are so many games out there that I don't have time to waste if it's going to be buggy. Case in point: I couldn't get the demo for XIII to work at my LCDs resolution (note to game developers: just support every reasonable resolution!! It's not hard. At a very minimum, support standard LCD resolutions like 1280x1024, because it will look like shit if it has to up-sample to display on a LCD!), and my mouse was like 100x more sensitive than it should have been, making it impossible to aim at anything. Despite that the demo did look cool, but in general it drove me away more than it attracted me. Rabid fans will love the game when it finally comes out no matter what, and, believe it or not, nobody else is actually sitting around checking the website every day to see if there's any new news. We can wait!

Demos are obsolete

[Forkenhoppen]

In the old days, the game development schedule went as follows:
- finish game
- release game
- rework a demo
- release demo
- work on expansion
- start sequel

Nowadays, the schedule goes:
- leaked copy
- work on game
- release game
- warez version available
- finish game
- release gold edition
- start sequel

The nice things about leaking a beta are:
- you don't have to actually customize anything
- it's completely not your fault if it sucks.

Between the warez version coming out right after release, and the number of leaked betas from E3 or whatever, I think the market for official demos has completely dried up. Especially considering the longer development times for products nowadays, and the fact that most of these companies live hand-to-mouth.

Damned if you do and damned if you don't

[Mike Hawk]

Wow, the gamers do it again.

So which is it? Should a publisher put out a demo before the game is gold or after?

If they put out an official demo before, OF COURSE its not final code. In fact, at least part of the development team has to stop working on the main sku to get the demo out so it slows both projects down. So the demo gets into gamers' hands before the game hits the shelf, but everyone gets pissed off because its not bug-free.

If the official demo comes out after the game ships, everyone complains about that and uses it as an excuse to infringe the publisher's copyright and download a warez copy. Huh.

How can the publishers make you happy when you don't even know what you want?