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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."
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.NET 2.0 framework, again, unpatched, installed an outdated version of MSXML parser, and disassociated my .NET file extensions so .cs files would no longer open in my editor by default).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.
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...
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
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.