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Do Game Demos Have an Adverse Effect On Sales?
An anonymous reader writes "Unigamesity has an analysis of the effects game demos and beta tests have on the full release of video games. Quoting: 'If we think about LittleBigPlanet, Age of Conan or Mirror's Edge, we notice they have two things in common: very successful and well received demo versions (or beta stages) and very poor, lower than anticipated game sales. And since these are not the only titles in which a demo (or the lack of it) appears to be connected with their commercial success, I believe we should analyze the influence demos have in the game world and debate: are game demos game killers?'"
Only if the game sucks.
Maybe its more like... if your big draw relies on a gimmick that may wear thin during the demo, you may want to rethink your release strategy.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I would say yes, game demos can kill a game for these reasons:
If you can try before you buy, of course sales are going to go down. Those who buy include those who tried and liked and those who didn't try but gave it a shot in the dark. The publisher/developer isn't really going to care what the user's opinion of the game is after the sale, lest a patch break the game or something like that.
A buyer of a game may or may not tell others about that game, and if he or she does tell others, he may support a purchase or warn against the purchase.
Demos serve a primary purpose: a test drive. If you like it, buy it and use it more. If you don't like it, don't buy it.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
If we take the given fact that demos are there for the users to try the game before they buy it, to know if they like it enough to play a "full length" game, I think this is a good thing. And the only thing we can deduce from the fact that those game, if after the users played the demos, didn't want to buy them, well it meant that either they didn't like the game enough, they didn't feel like it was worth it, or the novelty of the game was over after the Demo.
In all the cases, the only thing the Demo did is to prevent the buyers from buying bad games or games they don't like. So it maybe hurt the game, but it was all for the benefit of the consumer.
On the other hand, if the game company want to try their hand at passing "bad" games for "good" games, so that the buyers buy bad stuff, they should stop the buyers from trying it before. If you want to sell a bottle of water as vodka to someone, don't let him taste it before!
I wouldn't mind you in my head, if you weren't so clearly mad -Lews Therin Telamon
Actually, it's not anywhere close to this in games. And that's exactly why demos are (for most games) not really good for sales.
Let's be honest here. Most games today are prone to repetition. You do, essentially, the same thing over and over and over. Take the average FPS game. What's the difference between the first and the last level, usually? Different/more weapons and harder enemies. Where "harder" usually means "more" or "takes more shots or harder hitting guns to kill them". Add different map design and maybe different texture, and you're done with the differences.
If that game should have some distinct feature (like, say, a portal gun), you WILL see this feature in the demo. Simply because you have to show it (and there your comparison to the "good parts" of the movie is right). So you have seen that distinct feature that sets it apart from the rest of the crowd in the demo. Why bother with the full version?
OTOH, if you do not show that distinct feature, the player will just say "meh, another vanilla shooter game" and toss it immediately.
A good demo should show you something neat, should show you why you want to play this game, but should also make you want to see more of it. Maybe hint that there is more to be seen if you get the full version.
Instead, you usually get to see the first few levels of the game, you are allowed to play the tutorial or the first map. That's like showing the opener of the movie. Be honest. How many movies would you have wanted to see after seeing, say, the first 5 minutes?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Look at the release dates of the games in question. A better title would read "Does A Failing Economy Have An Adverse Effect On Sales Of Luxury Items?"
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
"very successful and well received demo versions" seems to translate to "widely-downloaded demo" rather than "demo that makes people rant and rave about how awesome this will be".
LittleBigPlanet was getting a lot of Sony's promotional efforts behind it. This article notes that Sony is hoping it'll be a console-selling game.
Mirror's Edge also had a lot of EA's promotion behind it.
I dunno how much puffery Conan was getting as I refuse to play MMORPGs; I only become aware of them when half my friends get sucked into them.
So... lots of people have heard of at least two of the titles this article discusses. Lots of people are curious about them because of all the articles praising them as revolutionary, important, etc. So lots of people downloaded the thing, and decided it was not for them.
Isn't that what a demo is for? Hell, I'm one of the people that downloaded the Mirror's Edge demo solely because of all the hype. I didn't even finish the demo level because I really just don't like first-person games. I also downloaded Space Giraffe and Braid, played the demos, paid my money, and told my friends about these awesome games I just bought.
Lots of people pick up books in the bookstore, flip through them and read a few pages, then put them back on the shelf unpurchased. I would bet that if we had any way of counting this, we would find that books with an aggressive press campaign have more people pick them up to flip through.
egypt urnash minimal art.
typically I play a demo after I own the game, so figure out where I fit in your slashmarket research.
You would fit quite comfortably in the "fucking mystifying" category :-)
I record my sleeptalking
Mod parent up.
Making a demo is a complete PITA. You have to take premature code that isn't ready, splice everything in such a way that it kind of hangs together, finish your most polished level in a way that will probably need to be re-done anyway, and throw it all out there in a package that hopefully doesn't crash. Then re-do all of that emergency hack-job work for real. A demo can easily steal one to four development weeks from a team. And sadly, I have never used, seen, or built a demo with the skill or interest that a movie trailer can generate.
A big part of that is that you simply have to teach the player how to play. And as you build up your game, you should be training the player in all of the various types of things they will need as they develop new powers and abilities. Essentially, if you're going to provide a 15 minute taste of the full game, you have to provide the first 15 minutes of the difficulty curve, and maybe throw in a spectacular boss fight earlier than when it would normally occur. If you were to provide a highlight reel of the game, you would be rapid-fire throwing disparate gameplay systems at the player in ways that your loading time and finish level can't support (remember, the demo is usually made before the game is finished). If your game was that ready, you'd ship it. And, as these are taken from the general development team and budget, any time spent polishing your demo is less time spent polishing your game.
Compared to software and game demos, movie trailers are easy.
The ______ Agenda
"LittleBigPlanet, Age of Conan or Mirror's Edge, we notice they have two things in common: very successful and well received demo versions (or beta stages) and very poor, lower than anticipated game sales."
LittleBigPlanet = great demo! Similarly, great first hour or two of game! The rest of the game is boring and monotonous. In other words, the demo is actually more fun than the real game.
Age of Conan = WOW clone but not as good, people always praise WOW clones but prefer to play the original
Mirror's Edge = Great concept, except the rest of the game is the same thing over and over. Again, this means the demo is great, but the rest of the game is basically the demo over and over again.
What do all three of these games have in common? THEY SUCK!
Warhammer 40k had a well-received demo and it sold very well, enough to warrant 3 expansions and a soon to be released sequel that some claim will be Starcraft 2's main competition.
Speaking of Starcraft, it's one of the best selling games of all time and it had a well-received demo.
WOW has a demo and it has the highest subscription rate out of any MMO in the country.
Sorry, idea was initially interesting but fails on a many levels.
The question was: "Do Game Demos Have An Adverse Effect On Sales?"
The answer is: "Only if the game in question sucks, is mediocre, or is a one-joke wonder."
A better question would be: "If they don't think their gameplay holds up, why won't they release a demo?"
Compare Doom, for example. Doom, on the face of it, rocked for its time. Giving away an entire 1/3 of the game, far from "having an adverse effect on sales", helped make it a sales king. Even when id software released Doom2, they had a demo out, and the demo still kicked ass and drove sales.
Now think of a lot of games with a demo that "hurt" sales. What games are these? They're mediocre titles. They're titles that just plain aren't worth $50-60 to buy in.
They're the titles that the companies have to trick you into buying. A flashy set of screenshots on the box (that may or may not be representative of the game at all, or may be images of the pre-rendered cutscenes masquerading as "gameplay footage"), a paid-for (or threatened-for) review in a few magazines to garner an award or catchy phrase on the box (how many "best XXX of XXX - XXX magazine" blurbs do we see every year?), "managed review scores" that embargo any site giving below X% so as to trick the early-comers into thinking the game is hot (watch how many games drop from 90% to below 70% aggregate within a month or two of release, when the REAL gamers have their say) and so on.
Kick out a demo of a stinker, and the demo will still be a stinker. Kick out a demo of a mediocre title, and you'll probably turn off those who don't have money (or time) to burn on mediocre titles. Kick out a demo of something that kicks ass, and you'll draw sales.
Examples: I bought Doom on the strength of the "demo." I bought Descent on the strength of the demo. I bought Portal for the 360 on the strength of the demo. I bought the first episode of the Penny Arcade games on the strength of the demo (ok, so I bought episode 2 on the strength of episode 1).
I dropped Rocky & Bullwinkle, N+, and Marathon:Durandal after deciding the demo proved they weren't for me. I might have bought Guitar Hero: World Tour but it's almost exactly the same as Rock Band, and I already burned two months' gaming budget buying Rock Band songs. I don't need to burn another two months' budget on the same exact songs (even if I just use the RB controllers) for GH:WT just to play an almost identical game.
Video games may be "fairly inexpensive as far as luxuries go", but I still budget myself. $120 a month = 2 games, now. I think that's pretty extravagant. Plus working full-time and spending time out with friends (you know, enjoying natural light, social contact, girls, the real world and all), I don't have the time to buy 6 games/month and play them all anyways. I have to pick and choose. If there are demos, it helps me pick out the good ones. If a game doesn't have a demo, then my rent-before-buy policy will serve the same purpose.
Lesson to the game purveyors: you're competing for $120 of my budget and 40 hours of my time each month. If you can't bring a demo to the table, then you've got one strike against you, because I know you don't think your gameplay will grip me enough to buy the game.
If you can read this sig, congratulations, you have your glasses on!
Oh my fucking god - it's people in the game industry thinking like you that get us these generic fucking bullshit games.
Several games have already proven that it can indeed be different. The best example I can think of right now is the old half-life, though there are others as well. I enjoyed half-life as much as I did, because it was so varied. There was a lot of variance in the enemies to fight, and the marines were really great to fight against. Sometimes you were mostly "exploring" this awesome and big scientific complex, with all sorts of odd machinery and stuff. And sometimes you had to solve neat puzzles that were not too contrived but still got you thinking (a bit). The weapons also were very varied and generally extremely "satisfying" to use.
Yes, there is the better weapon/harder enemies progression as well, but that is absolutely fucking not the only thing you can do to make a game fun. I enjoyed every single minute of the original half-life because it got me so immersed as there was always something new and fresh to it. The developers really did everything they could to keep the players interest focused.
It's possible, the developers just need to be aware of the fact that there ARE ways to keep the players interest, instead of stringing one section of bland hallway after another (I'm looking at you, F.E.A.R.)