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."

Comments

Demo

[MeanderingMind]

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.