Not Offering A Demo Better For Indie Games?

Thanks to DIYGames for their article showing surprising results from an independent game developer who offer games for sale directly on their website. According to the piece, "Every other visitor to the website is given an alternative page for each game that does not give them the option to download a demo of the game. The idea is to see how sales are affected by not giving users a free demo." So, while the article points out that "the results are less than scientific", 43.3% of total dollar volume came from 'demo available page', and 56.7% of the dollar volume from the 'no demo available page'. The developer concluded by working out that "not offering a demo increased sales revenue by roughly 31%." Does not offering a demo increase the sales of a game, sometimes, or is this just crazy talk?

Comments

Depends

[antin]

It all depends on the game, you really have three situations:

1) Crap game. Releasing a demo just lets people find out ahead of time how crap it is. Sales plummit.

2) Great game. Releasing a demo allows people to discover how great the game is. Sales increase.

3) Average game - in this case I am not sure what happens. Do people buy it because it doesn't suck? Or do they skip it because it doens't rock?

I would think that the choice is pretty easy. If you have a great game, you should always release a demo. If you have a good game that people aren't that convinced about, you should release a demo. But if you have a crap game, never, ever, ever release a demo...

just do the math

[rhild]

Let's say 100 people visit the site. Let's say they all want to buy the game, but if given the chance to download a demo first, they will.

Of those 100, 50 hit the 'no demo available' page and make a purchase.

The other 50 hit the 'demo available page' and download the demo. They like it and come back to buy. When they come back to buy 25 will hit the 'no demo available page' and make their purchase. The other 25 hit the 'demo available' page and make their purchase.

The result: Of the 100 people 75 make the purchase from the 'no demo page' and 25 from the 'demo' page, thus proving demos are a bad idea???

Battlefront

[BigDork1001]

battlefront.com offers several games for sale only over the internet including their very successful Combat Mission series. The CM series is great but if I'd never been offered a demo to play I highly doubt I'd own both games that are out today and have my credit card ready for when the third goes on sale.

The fact is, games are expensive. I'm not just going to blindly buy a video game. For console games I'll rent them before I buy them and for computer games I get a demo first. It's how it is. I'm not going to throw my hard earned money away on crap.

10 days

[Scarblac]

The test was over 10 days. People who get the option to download a demo will usually do that first, even if they plan to buy anyway. If they like the game, come back to buy it. Probably, say, a few days later.

There is no such delay in people coming to the site, planning to buy it anyway, seeing no demo, thus buying the game.

Which means that if you only test for 10 days, this effect is significant. Not everyone who downloaded the demo and will buy it after a few days has come back yet.

And worse, half the people who do come back happen to get the "no demo available" page that time, so that they're counted wrong (as someone else mentioned).

In total, this is meaningless until you a) keep track of which page people got, and always give them the same one, and b) do it over a longer period.

Which is why they said it was "less than scientific". Which makes me wonder why they still tried to conclude things from it, if they knew the numbers were bogus...

I remember the day . . .

[werdna]

In the early days, when titles were more sparse, we bought them all, if we could. We wanted just to see what they did, and what they could make our computer do. A box cover that showed and told was all we needed. We would play the game a bit, see that it wasn't going to involve us utterly, and set it aside, happy to know what it did, and not really feeling cheated.

I suspect, if free demos abounded, I would never have bought half of the games I paid for. Today, the market is quite different -- we are not all hobbyists anymore, prices are higher, we are mostly jaded about what are computers can do and games no longer astonish merely because they exist.

Still, I think that property -- for marginal games -- may account to some degree for this behavior.

It's all relative

[thirty2bit]

There are too many factors involved.

Is the game the type that the viewer likes? RPG, RTS, FPS etc.

Do the graphics 'sell' the game adequately?

Does the buyer have $xx in their pocket to gamble on an unknown game?

In the case of multiplayer, are there enough others using multiplayer? That's for those out there who prefer multi over single.

Are there reviews attesting to the quality of the game?

All of this makes the 'demo vs. no demo' a superficial argument.

just do the reading

[Kwil]

Visitors were tracked with cookies.

Those that had cookies blocked were put in a separate pool and not counted for the experiment. The amount that had cookies blocked was apparantly non-significant in any event (1% or so)

Of course, there's still a couple of problems with the data. Presumably those who grab the demo will be making their decision to purchase somewhat later than those who do not have the option to get the demo. Which means the results are going to be skewed by whatever that time-period difference is.

Also, if the demo is available anywhere else, it becomes difficult to measure who had it to begin with.

Of course, another difficulty is that this experiment makes it difficult to tell what they're actually measuring. Perhaps what they're determining isn't that a demo is a poor marketing tool, but rather that the web-site is a good marketing tool for an otherwise poor game. A different web-site or different game might give wildly different results.