Slashdot Mirror
Game Demos Key to Game Purchases
GameDailyBiz is carrying a story looking at the importance of demoing a game before purchase, a factor apparently crucial in game buying decisions for many gamers. The NPD research found that demoing a game was even more important than the price of the game, when buying a title for yourself. Price was the ultimate deciding factor in game purchasing for gifts, however. From the article: "This kind of finding could be particularly important to publishers trying to determine the best way to divide up their marketing spend. Perhaps publishers would be better off putting more resources into providing gamers with a high-quality demo instead of investing heavily in a huge ad campaign. With in-store kiosks, Xbox Live Marketplace and the online features of the soon-to-be-launched PlayStation 3 and Wii, it's becoming easier than ever for publishers to distribute their game demos directly to the audience they're after."
When did "spend" become a noun?
I haven't played a game demo in probably 10 years, and yet I buy a couple a month. I do however read up on the premise before making a purchase.
I wonder what this says about me.
How many demo consoles actually work at any of the stores, and if they do, how often is there not a 6 year old fuck NOT mashing buttons on it?
This article is shit.
For games, I usually read reviews and impulse buy a lot of crap I never play. Demos have sometimes worked in the past, but it's not really a major factor.
But, the principle works for me for music. I won't buy stuff that I don't know if I will like (unless it is very cheap, then I tend to add a few extra discs for a couple bucks to an order, if descriptions sound decent - but so far I haven't found any good music this way).
I have never played a game demo for a console game. I've seen a few floating aroudn the the PS2, but none for any games I'm interested in. I usually rely on multiple online reviews and/or message boards.
.. sure I try out "demos". My good friend 'oosenet-ay' helps me out there. I've found that most commercially release PC games are in fact demos - in that the full functionality won't come out until 2 or 3 patches have been released and you can finally play the game without bugs.
For the PC
These pretzels are making me thirsty.
Perhaps demo consoles in stores work, but that's only because they give you the full game.
.NET 2.0 framework, again, unpatched, installed an outdated version of MSXML parser, and disassociated my .NET file extensions so .cs files would no longer open in my editor by default).
Downloadable demos are notoriously bad. Game companies hack their game apart to coble to together a demo and shove it out the door. They don't give a crap about bugs, and a demo appears to be a complete afterthought.
Game studios should plan for a demo in advance. Having some bugs is acceptable, but too many will turn your users away from your game. I played the Caesar IV demo and refuse to buy the full game because of their demo. The installation process was brutal and completely retarded (for instance, I have DirectX 9.0c installed, but their demo installer insisted on uninstalling my DirectX and installing a fresh, unpatched copy of DirectX 9.0c, requiring no less than 3 reboots; it installed the
Make a good demo and you'll see even better sales figures.
When the Gamecube came out and was based on an optical disc, one of the first things I thought of was "Oh, cool, they'll put demo discs into Nintendo Power and I will actually subscribe again!" Sadly, it never happened. There was one demo disc I remember that sold and it was awesome - Sonic, Viewtiful Joe, Splinter Cell... I think I would have bought more Gamecube games if I could have had one of those in my hands every month. I'd really like to see this rectified with the Wii. Maybe pressed demo discs will a thing of the past, but serving up demo content via download shouldn't be too difficult.
When I'm in the market for a new game I go for reviews and then the demos of the well reviewed games. I've bought some games I wouldn't have without the demo (Eve Online, Galactic Civ2) and decided not to buy games that were hyped up but not impressive in the demo.
We are all just people.
I used to be a big fan of PC demos that you could get from magazine CDs back in the days or by download these days. But the problem is that while years ago companies cared, they just don't anymore. Isn't it true that today demos often appear AFTER the game is on the market already? Back in the days, doom, decent, even half-life 1 had very nice demos that you could get a real feel for the game before you buy it. Those were nice days...
I used to never get demos either, and had mostly good luck with game purchases anyway, from knowing what I wanted. It was just too much hassle to find a download site, go through the Download Now link to another site, go through the Download Immediately link to another site, then sit in line for 30 minutes, before the using the Windows Installer and subsequently uninstaller for a 5-minute demo.
Xbox Live has however really changed that, it's very much easier and I have actually started downloading every demo on there. Still a bit of confusion as to what you can and can't do while downloading, but very simple both to download and remove. In my case it showed me that I didn't really want any of the current games on there. I do however think they should be a bit longer than 3-5 minutes (Kameo anyone?) if possible, added bonus if you can save at the end of it and continue at that point if/when you buy the game, or carry some sort of other incentive over.
"No shit, Sherlock."
Given the largely uninformative nature of reviews these days, the only options left to figure out if a game is any good are as follows:
1) Try it yourself
2) Read the box cover and judge from that
3) Force a brother/friend/slave to buy/rent the game.
4) Pester the Gamestop people about it incessantly until they ban you from the store for harassment.
Obviously 1 and 3 are related, while 2 and 4 are suboptimal. Quite simply, I'm far more inclined to buy games I have experience with beforehand. It took me about 5 minutes of actually play to realize I liked Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox, while it can take a day's worth of review and opinion browsing to even get a feel for some of the basic mechanics of a game, let alone finer points.
Because of that, I really enjoy demoing and renting games first. It's far more time efficient and worthwhile.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
Forget big retail games, many of their demos are poor, some install starforce, many are just HUGE, and often they have all that unskippable advert logo bollox. .exe link on my site. Imagine... no email signup, no pop-up ads, no fileplanet subscriptions, no persuading you to 'subscribe' to geta afster server. Just a direct, reliable, fast demo download, that is getright friendly.
If you want downloadable game demos, you want indie games. If you can live without cutting edge 3D effects, you will be pleasantly suprised.
I make a living (just) from selling downlaodable games, so it is absolutely ESSENTIAL for me to put together a good, fun demo that gets people into the game as quickly as possible, with no fuss, no delays.
To achieve this I make sure that:
1)the demo is small as it can be
2)the demo is the exact same code version as the full game. If the demo works fine, the full game does too
3)the demo starts up asap, with no logo nonsense.
4)you can *trivially* get my demo, from a direct
Its been obvious to me and my fellow devs that making a good demo available is *crucial* to any game that isn't hyped to oblivion. Where I used to work, they relied on hype to sell the games, so made sure they didnt get a demo done in time for release (if at all). Personally, I think gamers deserve to try before they buy.
Sorry for the long adver-rant, but this is an issue i feel really strongly about. Demos are essential for PC games, and so many companies screw it up.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
While some people prefer to try before they buy, there are a heck of a lot more people who buy games strictly on impulse. It's not much different than buying a DVD. No one intentionally goes looking around for five-minute clips of a movie they might be interested in buying before they buy it... they just buy it.
I was once a huge fan of the demo download stuff on Xbox Live after buying my Xbox 360, but I've learned over the months that the downloadable demos are rarely representative of the final product. The demos are often loaded with bugs and use inferior textures/models, which has actually driven me away from buying some game titles that I later found out were good in their final versions. As a result, I've often downloaded game demos of titles I was interested in, but rarely actually played any of them before buying the game itself.
To some extent, demos are important to a key few individuals. But claiming that demos are vital to the entire market is complete rubbish.
8==8 Bones 8==8
I wish that mobile phone service providers would realize this.
I don't know what other carriers are like, but Verizon has very, very few games offered through Get It Now that have demos. No way am I going to pay $10 for a game I've not seen nor heard of before. This is the reason I have never bought any games on Get It Now (beside the fact that they are all super expensive and I'd rather blow my cash on real computer games).
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
What is a good game for my Logitech Extreme 3D pro. I never use it because there don't seem to be a lot of games that make sense of joystick anymore. Flying, spaceships, cars. All I play now is Urban Terror and games that use mouse & AWSD.
Tell me some good demos!
I often play a demo or a "demo" (wink nudge) before purchasing a game, but it's a little frustrating when many demos these days exceed 1GB or even 1.5GB! That's a lot of time spent downloading to play a 20-minute demo. I don't mind the download times, really, but how about some more substantial demos?
I got antsy and bought Just Cause for PC last week. Oops. If I'd tried a demo (does one exist) I'd know it was an unpolished POS.
Of course game demos is an essential method of getting purchases. It worked for the shareware version of Doom, Quake, and the whole slew of games in ~1990-1995.
It's also the reason the "demo" levels tend to be the most polished in the full versions of the game - it's been tested heavily by the users that point out every single flaw in the map/whatever. Compare this to the "final" levels in the retail, which appear to be rushed in order to meet some deadline.
The last game I purchased was Shadowgrounds - based on the demo - and I am now proceeding to take screenshots of every single plot point. Since I took a bundle purchase, I also got Darwinia - a game where I wouldn't have bought otherwise (since it looked like it was a guarenteed victory game, especially on demo difficulty).
If you don't have some sort of demo system, then don't expect as many sales. It's a simple rule, especially with the software gaming industry.
Since most Mac games are ports, you never know what the quality of the port is going to be like, or if it's going to run on your system. I was mildly interested in Deus Ex when it came out, but the demo definitely got me hooked. Same for Unreal Tournament. The demo for NWN actually discouraged me from buying it. Now, with more recent titles, like Civilization IV, Quake IV and World of Warcraft, you definitely need to try before you buy, unless you have a high-end system. When it comes to buying games, there's nothing more disappointing than a game you've been looking forward to not working well on your computer after you've bought it.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Demos are fantastic, and after getting to know and love them on the 360, I'm quite certain the Wii and the PS3 will get fewer purchases from me if they don't make acquiring demos as easy and cheap (free) as Live! does.
Several posters have mentioned that demos are often buggy, and not representative of the final product. This may be true, but it really doesn't matter.
In the first place, since the article is proposing that good demos sell games, I don't see how bad demos really counter the assertion.
In the second place, from a personal standpoint, when I'm thinking about dropping $60 on a piece of entertainment, I would much rather employ a test that is biased towards false negatives than false positives. This may mean that I miss a game or two I would really have enjoyed, but it also means that the games I do buy, I enjoy. Of the fifteen or so video games I own for the 360, the only game that has proved to be a bad purchasing decision is one that I didn't play a demo for (PD:Z).
Relatedly, I just played the demo for Ninety-nine Nights...and went from being pretty interested in the game to dropping it from my "buy" list. Might it be a game that I would like if I gave it a chance? Sure, it's possible. But given the number of video games out there and the time/money I have to spend on playing them, it's guaranteed that I'm going to miss some good ones, anyway.
This just means it's the publisher's job to give me a demo that sells me on the game.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
ZOMG!!! Who'da thunk it?
Seriously, are media execs so ignorant of the real world that something like this is big news?
Hey, game industry execs! Here are a few other apparently crucial factors in game buying decisions:
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Yeah, it's amazing how most of the "Big business" distributors screw this up, yet how important it is.
Actually, it's not amazing at all. The "indies" have a strong advantage here, almost to the point of being a market inefficiency, because of the different business models:
With a "Big House" developer or distributor, marketing is separate from development. A "demo" or "Beta Demo" is a marketing requirement on development. If developers are trying to hold a timeline, that inevitably means that they won't always be receptive to putting out a free demo.
On the other hand, for an "indie game", the marketing budget is pretty darn small. The demo gets into the hands of a lot of potential players, pretty fast. Even someone who won't be a customer, whether because they don't have access to the cash, or because they're outright pirates, can at least be an unpaid "advertiser" for the product.
But demos are two-sided. A really, really crappy demo will scare people away from the product. Those who do this for commercial reasons often release crappy product. You don't want a demo of that. And then there's the threats-by-committee. What if you release a game with a major online component, and the "free area" becomes more successful than the "pay area"?
Demos are ok, but you really are only seeing a snippet of a game, and have no idea how good or bad it really is. Also, you have to have a really strong broadband connection to download it. The Battlefield 2142 download took a heck of a long time, and I have a 15Mb/s down fiber optic line. I didn't even download it on its first available date, too.
The problem with demos is it is the only really clean piece of code the game company will release, including its Gold image. They want to wow the customer, so they make that a really tightly QA'd portion of the game. You play it, and think "this is really tight! The gameplay was fast, fun, and I bet the rest of the game is the same way". And it often isn't. Especially since many development shops leave critical bugs in the game to foil the pirates that want to have the orignal disc image. Nothing like a zero-day patch to spoil any pirates!
So, the demo may be clean, but the rest of the game could be buggy as hell, requiring multiple patches to make it run smoothly for even the most common of system setups.
Anyone that plays a demo just needs to remember that what they are playing is probably tbe cream of the work done for that project.
Demos are great for the consumer, and I fully agree that we need more of them, however, for the business it may not be so helpful in some cases. A game that is fun, but repetitive, often gets boring after a while. A demo of such a game might actually reduce sales. And of course, having a poorly recieved demo in the first place will kill your sales.
When I register a game from say, publisher Electronic Arts, they ask me "How did you hear about this game?"
A-Magazine
B-Television
C-Friend
D-Saw it in a games store
etc
They never ask E-I played the warez version and liked it enough to buy it. If they're not asking about that form of "demo-ing" a game, they'll never be able take into account people who want to try before they buy with the cracked version.
The 90's called, they want their OBVIOUS back.
We've known this for a decade and a half already. Wolfenstein 3D and Doom proved the market. Just because they called it "shareware" back then doesn't change anything. GIVE PEOPLE A LITTLE, and if they like your product, they are more likely to buy it. *DUH*
Are you expecting size optimization to be performed to the extent that it was in .kkrieger, whose demo is 0.1 MB?
These requirements can be mutually conflicting. The full game may be optimized for speed, not size. In addition, the full game generally comes on a DVD, and its code includes an installer as well as verification of an authentication token stored on the DVD.
These requirements can also be mutually conflicting. The full game has production logos, which are often used to cover up loading.
At how many kilobytes per second? Is BitTorrent acceptable?
Even games in The Elder Scrolls series? ;-)
But are the "indies" producing games in the genres that I want? My PC has a TV output and a USB hub that accepts game controllers; where are the four-player PC games that take advantage of them? Where is the indie counterpart to Mario Party, Smash Bros., Bomberman, or WarioWare?
A lot of parents by DVDs on impulse. Specifically they buy G-rated DVDs, especially those distributed by The Walt Disney Company, to let them use the television as a surrogate babysitter.
Then have each publisher put demos of, say, all its 2006 titles on its 2007 demo disc. I seem to remember a disc distributed with the original PlayStation that had playable demos for ten games on it.
Why on Earth do you bother?
Your nonstandard phrasing ("A is B is C is D") makes it difficult to break up quoted text to address each point of your comment.
Copy authentication code that is separate from the game engine is ineffective, as it gives those who would defeat the copy authentication a single point to attack. Effective copy authentication relies on making the obscurity robust enough to survive an attack until at least after release week, and this means measures that produce a binary with intentional poor factoring.
And no, game code and artwork are not necessarily separate because some game code applies only to specific scenarios (or levels, maps, chapters, etc.) supported by specific artwork. Should effects or scripts that get activated only in scenarios that do not appear in the demo be left out of the executable (violating cliffsky's requirement 2), or should they be left in (violating cliffsky's requirement 1)?
Which violates cliffsky's requirement that "the demo is the exact same code version as the full game." Besides, do you want the mod community making mods that work on the demo, or do you want mod users to buy the full version?
I don't care if you've made the best game of the year, I'm not downloading a 1+ GB demo! Waiting several hours to play a demo that may or may not=be good/polished/buggy/have adequate length/hold my interest/work on my computer at all is not cool.
Demos don't really have an effect on my game purchasing. If I'm on the fence enough that the demo could swing it one way or the other, it's usually not a good enough game to merit dropping $40.
Usually when I download a demo it's either to tide me over until a game I'll definitely buy releases (as happened recently with Dawn of War: Dark Crusade), or because I'm bored and want to play something new without having to spend any money. In the first case, I'm already sold on the game anyway. If I'm not excited about the game to begin with, I'm probably not going to blow the money on it to begin with.
Of course, this is most because of my buying habits: I don't buy something unless I need it or seriously want it. There's not much room for something that could potentially suck, unless it's dirt cheap.
There is a risk for publishers. If they make the demo really good, it can be more successful than the game itself.
My example is Unreal Tournament 2004. While it was a successful game, the demo included several very good maps and online modes for them, and to this day there are far more people playing demo than the full version. I'm fairly confident that some of those people would have bought the full version if the demo hadn't been so thoroughly good.
So there's a tricky judgement to make about how much content and quality to give away.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Clearly Nintendo already knows this well; every major video game store has a wireless DS kiosk with free wireless demos. You just connect wireless, pick which one you want and you can play it as much as you want on your own DS until you turn off the power. Even that's not a big restriction, as you can just close the DS to put it in sleep mode, which is very efficient - a DS can sleep for days.
It's a very nice system, very easy to use and great for consumers. I can't yet say that I've purchased something directly because of it, but it has gotten me interested in some games that I wouldn't have heard of otherwise.
I remember back in about 1995 I was occasionally buying PC Gamer, and one month they had a feature on Transport Tycoon, a game I'd never heard of. They supplied a demo disk, but I remember tossing it aside because I din't have enough ram to run the game. However, once I upgraded, I plugged in the disk, and was instantly hooked. I've played that game ever since, and it seems I'm not the only one - the game has inspired an entire development community, including the TTDPatch, and OpenTTD.
I did the same thing with Battlefield 1942. I didn't hear of it until the demo was already out. Everyone said I had to play the demo, so I did. Just like that, I was hooked, and I bought the game the week of release. I did the same thing with Battlefield 2, because it was such a big improvement, even over the Desert Combat mod. However, recently I played the demo for Battlefield 2142, and I found that it sucked, so I refused to buy it.
The game that I havn't played demos for (because they were not available): I'd say I enjoyed at least 2/3 of the games, but I find the ratio is only that good because I research them extensively.
Yay for demos! They make it easy to find good games.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
If your computer is compatible with everything but the copy authentication, which is often based on bad sectors on the DVD or the Burst Cutting Area or something hardwareish like that, then a computer might be compatible with everything in the game except its copy authentication. Cue stories of people getting no-CD cracks just to make games that use StarForce work.
And then pirates will negative-day release your game's single player component.
Do you mean that the AI of game characters not included in the demo and the procedures used to generate textures and models not included in the demos should be interpreted, not compiled? How much speed penalty will this exact? Even on a handheld? Or do you mean that the compiled AI should be distributed as a compiled DLL in the assets?
Any space penalty is too much according to a strict interpretation of requirement 1: "the demo is small as it can be". Imagine if procedural pine trees show up only in one level of the game, a level that is not included in the demo. If the code to render the trees is left in the demo, then the strict interpretation of requirement 1 is violated. If the code is removed from the demo, then the strict interpretation of requirement 2 is violated. If the code is put in the assets and interpreted, then performance suffers.
The modding community tries to be legit, providing patches against the full version, not the full version itself. A mod for the full game requires the full game; a mod for the demo requires the demo. A mod may make its resources look just like internal resources (e.g. Doom before the PWAD system was implemented). Or are you talking about digital signature verification of assets?
I was confused by the lack of qualification of "code" in the sentence "the demo is the exact same code version as the full game" with a modifier of "source" or "object" or "executable". As I first read it, I got the impression that it had better be the same executable. I was waiting for cliffsky to clarify.