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Crytek Thinks Free Game Demos Will Soon Be Extinct
An anonymous reader writes with this quote from Develop:
"The CEO of indie studio Crytek has defended EA's divisive 'premium downloadable content' strategy, while also predicting the extinction of free game demos. ... Crytek's co-founder Cevat Yerli said he wasn't sure that a demo of Crysis 2 was going to be released. He said: 'A free demo is a luxury we have in the game industry that we don't have in other industries such as film. Because we've had this free luxury for so long, now there are plans to change this people are complaining about it. The reality is that we might not see any free game demos in the long term. ... Yes it is quite unpopular, but this is a messaging issue. The problem with any new strategy like this is it initially may appear as a blood-hungry, money-grabbing strategy. But I think there is a genuine interest here to give gamers something more than a small demo released for free. Really, what this is, is an attempt to salvage a problem. The industry is still losing a lot of money to piracy as the market becomes more online-based. So it’s encouraging to see strategies outlined to combat this.'"
"A free demo is a luxury we have in the game industry that we don't have in other industries such as film" what are trailers? they provide about the same relative amount of the product before paying for it
I played Farcry and was terribly unimpressed with Crytek, this does nothing to make me want to spend money on their products.
So now you won't find out our game is crap till you buy it! :p
I personally loved having to scrounge around for pills like a junkie in withdrawl.
I love it!
As an indie game developer, I love the fact that I can be agile while the other guys are big & dumb. I can take risks on my titles. Kill off your free game demos. It just gives me one more tool to be profitable.
While you are at it, why don't you do any of these creative things. You can have this list for free
a. Require micropayments to save single player games
b. Require micropayments to save high scores
c. Never release free content for your games
d. Never give your community modding tools
e. Lock down your artwork and other IP, so 3rd parties cannot make fan sites.
It will make my job that much easier if you do.
games that suck are the problem,I have ended up with a bunch of games that stink if I have played a demo I wouldn't buy them, if you game suck make sure you don't give away any demos or trailers
When the game is great I'll be happy to get 2 copies
Free Demo's will probably be phased out over time. As big studios go on, they'll make the Beta open to select purchasers of other titles of theirs. See example; Halo:Reach Beta open to ODST buyers. Or Blizzard's Beta entries being determined by how much you play their other successful games.
Its reached a point where consumers can help developers out in beta testing - and that studios can selectively choose who to test it so they know their target audience better. A good symbiotic relationship, if you ask me.
I suppose if they want to go all digital and insist on paid demos, I can find another hobby. Granted, the games I currently own are enough to tide me over until the Thursday after Armageddon, but pulling the "luxury" card (at the same time he pulls the "piracy" card) has me at about -100 sympathy for the idiots. "Ooh look! Our game has user-destructible ferns! No content, but ferns!"
I'm sure there are a metric ton of people who will line up for this stupidity, but I won't be one of them. I mean, demos a luxury? What, like a decent game manual? (Oh that's right, I've not seen one of those in decades...)
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
I really do not understand this concept. Instead of letting users test the game and send in change requests, they are worried about money. I think the PS3 will be the last console I will ever own. I have owned them all. Wanna see my boxed Atari pong system?
its called downloading a full copy
If they dont have a demo then we dont have to buy their game. I know I wont buy a game unless I can play/test it first. Since 99% of game stores frown upon you trying out a game and returning it for your money back, the demo is the only real option. If you look at PS3's store and even XBox market place, the demos are always among the top downloaded items. You remove those demos and I bet the sales on most games will go down.
There are two games. One I know nothing about other then the developer telling me its worth 60$ and one I can actually try a bit of before shelling out the cash. Guess which one I'm going to be buying?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Surprisingly, the Nintendo Wii began offering demos of Wiiware titles, and to a limited extent short time demos of Virtual console titles (such as through Super Smash Bros Brawl). The only companies that have something to worry about are the ones releasing horrible games where the demo causes people to test and not purchase the full version.
The movie industry offers demos in the form of Previews. Although comparing the two are like apple and oranges.
But I think there is a genuine interest here to give gamers something more than a small demo released for free.
Nice! They'll start giving the entire games for free now!
With film its previews and trailers, with music its promotional tracks and samples, with books its the synopsis or just reading the first page or so before you buy it, with TV its promos and commercials, hell with newspapers its headlines. The point being that EVERY major entertainment medium for at least a hundred years uses this model of giving a little bit away for free to create interest and to promote themselves. The problem with EA and now Crytek is they are looking at peoples interest in game demos not as curiosity as to if they will purchase but rather a lead in to a definite purchase and hope to sell the same product twice much the same way that companies are toying with selling downloadable content already in game and then "unlocking" it. I think they will find very quickly that it just doesn't work that way. the sad thing is that they still scream bloody murder about piracy because they are losing sales and never consider for a moment that they're aggressive and offensive sales model and draconian protection schemes may be a factor.
It's a game. Who cares ? If the gaming industry gets as precious as the music industry, they'll go the same way. A product that will make money is one that's accessible, available and attractive. When an industry thinks IP is more important than keeping and attracting customers, it's dead in the water.
If a game is a downloaded and bought online, how come I can't say, pay $5 for the first level, and if I like it, pay another $5 for the next level, etc?
Of course there are equivalents in other industries, including film. There isn't a movie without a trailer. There are even some movies where you get to watch the first five minutes free online. Ever bought a car without a test drive? I didn't think so. Free samples are everywhere.
People are flocking to simpler games without high upfront costs. Not giving them a free chance to see what they're missing is only going to further marginalize big productions.
This wouldn't be so bad if your $10 or $15 was a credit towards the full version of the game. Plunk down $10 for 20% of the final product, pay the $50 or whatever amount is left from the MSRP if you want the whole thing. This works for the gamer in that they're getting a sizable portion of the game before it's released. And it works for the company in that people who wouldn't have bought the game otherwise will have coughed up $10 for an extended demo. This system would be a decent midway point between full retail releases and games released in episodes.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
I can't wait until they DRM the crap out of them, too.
You can't kill the free demo.
If you try, it turns out people will just obtain their demo any other way where they're not dishing out a single penny. Yes, I'm talking piracy. And they won't bother pirating the $5 demo, they'll pirate the full game, and use that to demo the game.
And console-only won't save you. All it takes is one person to say "Game XXX sucks". Friends of that guy then say "I heard game XXX sucks". And it then spreads quickly - after all, who's going to pay $5 for a demo of a game that sucks, nevermind buy the full game.
And all games suck - there is always someone unhappy with it.
I think I read this on page 34 of "How To Kill Your Business In 5 Easy Steps".
I really don't like Crytek, they are bitchy to the extreme. They are also the ones who whined that piracy was "killing" Crysis sales. They didn't seem to account for the fact that you needed, as Yhatzee put it, "A hypothetical future computer from space," to play it well. They didn't seem to consider that maybe sales reflect how many people can play the game well, if it doesn't work someone won't buy it. Oh, and it wasn't a very good game either.
Never mind that it sold a million copies.
So they can cram it. I think free demos will indeed continue in part because you can't know if a game will work and the publishers fight to keep retailers from taking returns. With movies, you've got a very high chance it works. All you have to do is make sure you buy the right kind of movie, not hard these days. If so, it'll work unless it is damaged, in which case just swap it for a new one.
Not so with computer games, the media can be fine but there can be an incompatibility. In that case there is no reason someone should be stuck with a game that doesn't run.
Also games are a much more substantial purchase. $40 is the minimum you tend to see a new title for and $50-60 is more common. As such it is reasonable to want to try out the product a bit more before committing to a purchase. The larger a purchase, the more most people want to examine it.
But they can do whatever they like. I frankly don't care, they've shown themselves incapable of making games I give a shit about. They look very pretty, but only because they require insane amounts of hardware. In the two I've played (Far Cry and Crysis) the game starts off as a interesting semi-sneaky shooter with some very meh vehicles and then quickly turns in to a crappy monster game. As such I figure they'll keep doing that. If there's no demo, I'll simply give them a miss.
Right. So you're telling me I should purchase your game, sight unseen.
That all I have to go on is whatever your marketing department has cooked up?
I just love knowing that I'd need to pay you for the privilege of finding out that your game is garbage. Here's my counter-proposal then: You discount my purchase of your demo against the finished product and/or allow me to return your crippled product if it does not perform to my satisfaction.
"I've spent my whole life figuring out crazy ways to do things. It'll work." -- Montgomery Scott, "Relics"
As others have already noted, movies *do* have free demos; they're known as "trailers." However, I never buy games unless I've played the demo first, and only if the demo runs well on my HW and it leaves me wanting more. No demo for me, no buy game from you. Sturgeon's Law applies to game just like anything else, and I'm not going to *pay* to find out whether a specific game is for me or not. The gaming bigwigs want to charge for demos? Fine. I'm sure the smaller developers will stay with the free demos, and I'll play their games instead. That's where the original stuff is anyway (yes, Sturgeon's Law still applies).
"He said: 'A free demo is a luxury we have in the game industry that we don't have in other industries such as film. " isn't a demo of a movie called a trailer?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The process toward another 1983 is astounding, and i'll be ready with the popcorn.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Game "pirates" weren't going to buy your software anyway. You didn't lose millions of sales due to piracy.
Crytek CEO: Get over yourself.
http://www.unfocus.com/
Is someone forgetting that the video game industry is out grossing the movie theater industry? You are not loosing money, you are earning an English ass load of cash instead of a metric ass load of cash. You don't loose anything, you just gain slightly less.
That's why you think you're losing money, EA? Not the fact that you make shitty games or the fact that you screw over your customers, you think it's pirates that are taking your business away? Reality check: The reason you want to stop offering Free Demos is because too many people are realizing the game is shit and aren't buying it as a result. Nothing to do with "luxury" or "giving the customer more." You don't "give" people more by charging them where there was no charge before. I would have way more respect if EA came out and said it was about money for themselves rather than trying to paint it like they're looking out for the players. The players are last on their mind.
Demos were just fine when you could pick up a magazine cover CD with 20 game demos on it. Now who downloads 2gb just to play 10 minutes of a game? Also Magazines have gone away from cover cds, being a hangover from the omg-CD-ROMs-are-teh-future bubble in the 90's, once they realized it's a quite a labor investment for a very mythical return. I'd go so far as to say it's actually hard to get big-title game demos out to gamers now.
Public BETAs are much more relevant way to both promote your game and make assist with the development.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
If they dont release a demo, then id just buy the game (if i think i wanted it, no promises i do), and if it doesnt run well, id return it within 7 days at my local games store, for a full refund)
thats if i wanted it... Farcry 2 is a brilliant example... the first game was very fun... the second was so repetitive, i hated it...
Look at the XBox 360's indie game market. That's the hobbyist/indy storefront for games people write with the XNA tools.
Every single game there gets a free demo, in that you can download every one of them for free. Even if the developer didn't code in any "demo" logic, if you don't pay, you get to run the game in a mode where it can't save any state and it auto-terminates after a short while.
A demo like that is cheap to implement. It's also something that, while the developers may not want to provide it, the people you buy your games from directly need for it to be there. Especially with digital delivery.
With digital delivery, there's no return policy, no trade-ins, no used game sales. This means if you shell out for an awful game, you're stuck with it. If I'm a digital delivery storefront, I'm going to want to entice people to buy games through me. The first time they buy an awful game and can't do anything about it, that's going to dramatically lower the odds that they'll buy any games in the future. The developer of that one game may not care -- they may be delighted, they got their cash -- but the storefront owner is going to care a lot, because they have an ongoing relationship with the customer.
And so you'll see things like the mandatory free demo we get with XBLA and "indie games" (perhaps coupled with the low-cost demo implementation you get for the "indie games").
(Honestly, I expect this mandatory demo policy to even make it to the iPhone app store at some point.)
I don't remember the last time that I played a demo, but then I tend to wait until the games are on special at around $5. If I really want something then I will pay $10 (like I did this weekend for Dirt 2 at Direct2Drive's current sale). Sure I am behind everyone else, but then often the worst of the DRM has been removed, major bugs fixed and there's enough reviews written by people who aren't getting paid to be positive about a game.
I feel if I can no longer resell games second hand due to activation or being tied to services like Steam then will only pay single digit amounts. It works for me because I got bored of multiplayer years ago.
I think regardless of how useful or useless a game demo is, taking something away that's always been expected will always cause the general gaming community masses to complain and revolt about it. End users will see it as Big Corporation raping their middle-class-rut pocket books, piracy will spike for their games as the end user's way of "sticking it to the man".
I think if the Crytek gaming companies of the world do take all the money spend on marketing, packaging, R&D, escalated development cycle, ect. of promoting and distributing the demo and put the rest of that effort and money back into enhance the game in some way, then I think it's going to be a win. If it's not, then, it's just another lost cause in the gaming industry that's going to trickle down through the ranks.
Crytek can pad their story how they want; their motive of putting out a better, more thorough gaming product or a way to slash costs and blame the economy will eventually reveal itself in the end.
Who needs demos? For the most part I don't even bother buying games until they hit $40 anymore, better yet I wait till they hit $20.
Gotta to love Steam for that.
Fuck the companies that think I'm going to pre-order games or buy them opening day blind for $60.
strange....but not unexpected from Crytek, among a growing number of dev studios who are becoming disconnected with their customers (PC gamers) which in turn drives down their own sales.
Look at Ubisoft or even "CRYSIS" (which has been categorized by many as being a "tech demo" rather than a game)
I do have to admit, the original Far Cry was awesome even with the gameplay and plot but pretty much every game coming from Crytek since then have been alienating gamers (not to mention their controversial comments that seems to also further anger their potential customers).
Perhaps they need to not follow the footsteps of the R*AA/M*AA and actually concentrate on games that gamers will actually like to play.
Why else would their competitors such as Valve can make money even with such out-dated game engines or their infamous "Valve time" schedule?
I'll go tell South Korea and China they don't exist then.
Meanwhile the rest of us will just keep playing free Facebook games on our iPads and ignoring what EA or Crytek want.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You can't kill the free demo.
If you try, it turns out people will just obtain their demo any other way where they're not dishing out a single penny. Yes, I'm talking piracy. And they won't bother pirating the $5 demo, they'll pirate the full game, and use that to demo the game.
^^^ Exactly that. I had my rant about this a few weeks back when there was an article about EA and "paid demos."
In a nutshell:
I pirated a lot of Apple and C-64 stuff as a teen. PC I've barely pirated any games at all. Take away demos? I'll pirate every game I might want so I can try it out as a demo. If I really, really like it I'll buy it. If I kind of like it I'll keep it and forgo buying it since you didn't think my trade was worth releasing a demo. If I hate it I'll delete it.
I'll still end up with the game it I want it. You'll end up with less of my money and far less of my good will.
He complains about piracy when game demos actually render piracy useless for those people who pirate just to try the game before buying it.
If they don't provide a demo, people are just going to pirate the games to see if they're any good. Then I'd say you have a 50-50 chance that someone is actually going to buy a legal copy if it's any good. Sounds like crazy talk to me. Pretty much every game I have for my Xbox 360 I tested as a demo first. Now sure you'll argue that I paid for a gold members for access but most can be played with a silver account.
So what they're saying is that most mainstream developers can only make short games, therefore providing a demo would be giving too much value away. Because we totally need insane graphics.
I download demos all of the time to evaluate games I am not familiar with. I downloaded the Virtual On demo for the X360 and then bought the game a week later. I download Super Puzzle Fighter HD for the PS3 based off of playing the demo. I hadn't even heard of Heavy Rain before I played the demo...and after playing the free demo from the PSN, I pre-ordered SIX fucking copies to give to my friends and coworkers when the game came out. Without demos I guarantee that I would own less than half as many games as I do now. Obviously for stuff like Metal Gear Solid 5 (upcoming PSP game), Monster Hunter Tri, and Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution, those games I didn't need demos for. I am familiar with past games in the series or trust those brands enough for a purchase sight unseen.
But if I can't get a demo for a game that I don't know about? Then I'll just pirate a full version and 'demo' that for a while going forward I guess. If I like the game then I'll buy it. If I don't then I'll probably delete it. Not having free demos probably won't hurt a resourceful nerd like me. I can find full versions on Us*n*t or just borrow a copy from one of my basement dwelling friends or coworkers and use them as demos.
This is only going to hurt more casual gamers who rely on free demos to sample products. Every week when the PSN or XBL update for new demos, or when Gamespot or whatever offers new PC demo downloads, that's just free marketing. A good demo spreads via word of mouth and becomes free promotion. No demo = no promotion, nothing to increase sales, no exposure.
So far this month we've heard that free demos are going away and that consoles will be a thing of the past. What other ridiculous and insane predictions do we have to look forward to the remainder of the year?
I don't download game demos anymore, I download the whole pirated game. If it's good and I like it, then I'll buy the game.
So ya, whatever works
Be seeing you...
I think that the secret grumblings going on is that these developers are wishing for a time when the Sega Master System and the Nintendo Entertainment System roamed the earth.
You didn't really get demos of games for these, free for downloading at the time they were popular.
( - This ignores, of course, the Nintendo Play Choice 10 machines, and any Sega equivalent of the time, in which I'm sure plenty of us of the respective age range would beg mom for quarters to feed whilst she did whatever she was out and about to do. It was great, because one would feed a machine quarters, play games, and when one gets home, beg dad to buy Track and Field or Contra, or whatever. PC10s were, effectively, paid demo machines that would give you access to the full game for the right amount of dosh and skill!
It also ignores the people who had dumpers and carts to dump their old games onto, or necessary emulation software to play it on a PC.)
One of these days, I am going to flip out. When I flip out, I'll be back in five minutes.
You can buy the full version of the game from pretty much any retail outlet and return it within 7 days for a full refund.
Of course that takes a bit more effort than downloading a free demo, but you can experience more than the demo would show you as well.
I find it funny when gaming execs (or music, or movie) go on about how much money they are "losing" to piracy. I know a 100% sure fire way they could defeat the pirates. Make really cool games, advertise them massively, then just keep them in house and never release them. Think how much more money they would make if they never let the games out into the public so that the pirates couldn't copy them. Maybe if they worked really hard at their security, they could let people pay them to come into their facilities and play the games, but they would have to be careful, if they let just anybody in, someone might make a copy and sneak it out. /s
These guys need to stop worrying about how many copies of their games are pirated and concentrate on getting more people to pay for their games. While it may be true that if they do absolutely nothing about people who pirate their games, more and more people will pirate the games rather than buy them, they are much more obsessed with stopping pirates than they are with getting paying customers.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
In addition to providing a (hopefully representative) test of content that we as gamers pay quite a premium for, free demos are extremely useful for benchmarking how a new title will run on a custom-built machine. I cannot stress this enough - I don't buy a title unless I have some idea of how it will run on my rig, and an in-game demo is far more useful than a theoretical advert on the side of the box/website. Eliminate this source of info, and you have some gamers who won't take the risk that a new title will perform adequately on an older custom built, and some other, more vocal gamers who -will- take the risk and then be extremely annoyed and dissatisfied - especially if a title isn't well optimized compared to similar titles with similar theoretical requirements (See: Mass effect 1 vs Mass effect 2) The suggestion that free demos aren't of benefit is insulting.
People have already made the point about movie trailers being the film industry equivalent of game demos, but that wasn't really the worst thing he said. He made that most heinous of claims, that the industry is losing money to piracy, which anyone with half a brain can see is nothing more than a scare tactic or sympathy plea, depending on how it's employed. The era of the video game publisher is coming to an end and they're scared, very scared. This is just another example of how they know they have everything to lose. I've been boycotting the industry for a few years now due to practices such as this, anyone else with a free mind would be wise to as well.
Are they TRYING to make excuses for failed games?
When people stop buying a $50-70 game because they don't know how good it is are they going to blame piracy again? Wtf.
I can see some part of his point. Most people who download the demo are already interested, so it's kind of redundant. I know of several games where I was uninterested until my friends told me to try the demo out.
I know people who sit around downloading demos to find which game they're going to buy next.
While I don't think this will ever work for all games, for some games I can definitely see them going without a demo (or even better, charging for it) and it going over well. Any new games will obviously still need trailers. If you have never heard of the game before (and especially if you don't know the studio), most people aren't going to shell out $60 without a demo. But for established franchises, no one really cares about the demo, they just play it to hold them over until the full game is out. Does anyone really care about the demo of Madden 2011? The people who buy Madden will buy it, even if they can't play the demo (if anyone even does play the demo). When the new Halo or Gears of War or Mario of Zelda game comes out, all the fanboys will be lined up for it, even without a demo. And many of those fanboys would happily pay $5 for the demo just so they can brag that they played the demo and the game is great (or the game sucks, but they will still buy it anyway). With established games, everyone already knows what the game is going to be like, so the demo really doesn't serve much purpose.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Would you rather have an autosave that runs in the background every three seconds, with no ability to load anything but the latest saved state of a given campaign?
I wouldn't take the full version of Crysis for free. These guys can shut the hell up until they can make a good game.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
This guy is an imbecile.
The fact of the matter is: Crytek games suck balls! They have sucked balls since the begining with poor stories, horrible gameplay, crappy derivative characters and boring overall experiences. What do they have? Graphics.
So, if make a game trailer of a Crytek game it'll look awesome! But if you let people play a demo, they'll soon catch on that the game sucks. Hence: kill the demos.
Meanwhile, peole who make good games won't be afraid to release demos to spike the interest of gamers and also to give us something to play for a few weeks while we save the horrid amounts of money they charge for games these days!
Piracy is here to stay.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
We've had one serious rash of video game soothsayers predicting the end of exactly the business practices that make some facebook games so incredibly profitable. Sounds like these dumb asses see the industry changing, but lack any real comprehension.
If anything, the profitable future is giving away the game for free, but charging players for leveling, while encouraging payment through social factors.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Yeah if the movie trailers aren't doing it for you what about free product samples in a big box, test driving a car, a walk through of a house... No he wants to make game demos akin to wine tasting which is a little grandiose considering the lowest common denominator game design so in vogue these days.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
What you're looking for is episodic games. They already exist.
I would pay some money for a demo -IF- (and this is a BIG if) whatever I paid towards the demo was then applied toward buying the full game. I mean, a demo is basically a shorter version of the full game right? They didn't make new content SPECIFICALLY for the demo did they? So why should I pay for it twice? Say game price is $50, demo price is $10, I pay $40 when the full game comes out.
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
Allow us to share this free first level with all of our friends legally with no fear of lawsuits, so we can get them interested in the game as well.
So in other words, you propose reducing the full game to the status of an expansion pack. This runs the risk of the free demo becoming a substitute for the game. People might use the modding tools to make more levels for the shareware version, and then people will play those homemade levels instead of the official expansion pack.
$5 please. :)
Paying for demos and trailers... trust me, we will see someone do it and fail. FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIILLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL.
Games are not overpriced.
With movies, now, you shell out $12 a person, and of course you aren't by yourself but with a friend, S.O., etc, so it's really $24. But then you want popcorn and drinks, so actually it's $40. And if that's not enough, it's not interactive at all, and 2.5 hours later the experience is permanently over. Yet nobody bats an eye.
Tell them to spend 50% more on something that lasts orders of magnitude longer, is permanent, and can even be resold to recoup some of the loss and people start freaking out. I seriously don't get it.
Just as with a movie, there's a chance it's going to suck. You could always, you know, wait for the review?
Well, I don't see MMO trial accounts going extinct any time soon either. Most of the time it doesn't even boil down to more than a flag on the server, as implementation effort for a trial account. And after the first expansion pack or two, it's not even like they're giving out some huge value in letting one play the first 20 levels.
So basically it seems to like EA might only manage to lose its single player division.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If you belive that refusing to allow people to sample your product leads to *less* piracy, you're obviously a moron. The only reason to stop providing demos is that your product is so bad that noone will buy it if he/she knows what crap it is.
I use game demos to base my purchases off. I don't run the latest greatest hardware on my computer. Some games like Counter-Strike: Source, Call of Duty: MW and MW2 run really well on my computer while other games like Mass Effect do not. Without a demo I can't gauge whether or not the full game will run properly.
I am not willing to take a $60 risk (not to mention money wasted on gas or shipping) only to find out that the game I just purchased runs at a poor FPS rate.
I just won't buy games anymore, besides they waste quite a bit of my time anyways...
This came through loud and clear:
The problem with any new strategy like this is it initially may appear as a blood-hungry, money-grabbing strategy...
Interestingly, Mr. Yerli says nothing at all to rebut this "appearance."
Do they think we pay to watch trailers? Are they joking?
... Gamers think that Crytek will soon be extinct.
I feel oddly guilty now, having downloaded the Crysis demo just last night to punish my new video card.
I was going to read the article quoting the CEO of Crytek (the creators of Crysis 2) but it seems that my computer and video card aren't fast enough to view it. ........
I'm here all week!
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
It's good to see any run of the mill village idiot can still start a game company. I was beginning to think it was only for smart people.
I see why he is concerned, however. When your game is utter crap, who wants people finding out before they fork over large sums of cash? A free demo is just a way for people to discover the game is junk and let their friends know.
I can't tell you how many games I sat on the fence for and only decided to purchase AFTER the free demo proved the game might be worth it.
But maybe he's right, maybe Chik Fil'A will stop handing out free samples. Maybe movie theatres will stop showing trailers of upcoming movies. Maybe MMO companies will stop giving out 5-10 day free trials.
Maybe the Sun will stop coming up in the East.
Until then, I suspect Crytek is in trouble with their current management.
-- Should there be smoke coming out of my CPU?
EA will lose my business then, as I'm not about to fork out $45+ on (non-refundable) game to just find out if its any good or not after I've paid for it.
Part of the problem is that you just can't trust many PC games review sites, as they often give 90+% marks to the most terrible DRM'd, buggy or just crappy games apparently just because the games company is overhyping it as the next blockbuster. It seems the reviewers are more concerned about protecting their backhanders and future advertising revenue than their journalistic integrity and readership.
I really can't imagine that it takes much extra effort to produce a demo anyway... they're usually just the final product with most of the content/levels taken out.
err... I meant Crytek
Clearly this guy has never spent some time selling crack - the first hit is always free.
Dear Cevat Yerli,
You gave some reasons against free demos. But what I get from that is that demos are bad. Really, how are premium demos better? It will still cost you money to make them and since "people pirate to play the game for free", what make you think they are going to pay for an incomplete one?
Regards,
A currently legit, likely ex-, customer
Free demo's are good. They build buzz and interest in a game. Without them studios need to spend much more money attempting to get gamers to buy. Of course if your games are all crap, you want the suckers to buy before they find out...
So, you want us to buy your game, before we test it and know that we can enjoy it, by looking at 'reviews' in various publishings that collaborate with the industry ?
just like how the movie industry works ?
as a fellow turk, all i have to say to you is; fuck it. if you follow in the footsteps of movie industry, ie, preparing previews that pitt the film by getting its best parts meshed into a 10 second 'preview', and have numerous industry shills (hint :critics) praise it, and then charge us for playing it, and show us a subpar (or overhyped) game, you can get away with it once, twice, in the third you will get pirated out of your ass by everyone.
that is the main reason why movies are pirated this much anyway. with few exceptions they are mass produced repeat shit. you can fool people into paying $15 for them once. twice. in the third, they will fuck you instead of letting you fuck them.
so wise up. ea, already a corporation with a VERY bad reputation, may try to put gamers into pants of fools, but, gamer crowd is not like moviegoer crowd. we have much higher sense of justice, much higher technical aptidude, much higher consciousness rating in regard to products. you will be sorry if you play along with ea.
Read radical news here
"95% of games sold[*] are rewarmed sequels or annual rehashes, and play times are getting shorter and shorter. Most demos will only serve to highlight how stale the gameplay actually is, while giving away proportionately more and more of the content. Our target market of sequel-monkeys is going to buy the next iteration of our franchise anyway - a demo can only serve to dissuade them from doing so."
[*] For the hard of understanding, 95% of games sold does not mean 95% of games developed. There are original games out there, and demos serve them well. But the majority of purchases - i.e. the big money - is not in original, risky games. It's in selling the next hit of the crack pipe.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I watch movies, I watch movie trailers. I play games, I play demos. Films are also guaranteed to work on my player, games aren't. Films cost $15, games cost $60. Films are usually 90-120m, I expect a much bigger time commitment to a game (minimum 15x as much). I've seen very few films where I thought it was 90mins of my life lost, whereas I have played many utterly worthless games.
A valid argument against making any demo. How is this in favour of making paid demos?
Instead of being annoyed with your customers, consider that this is a result of publisher's past behaviour resulting in a loss of trust from their customers. This may or may not be due, it doesn't matter. The phrase "the customer is always right" is often misunderstood. It does not mean a person whom is a customer is thereby always accurate with facts. It means a person is always right in their capacity as a customer: he has the money you want, and no reason to give it to you unless you do what he wants. A lot of people seem to get this confused when they are distanced from the customer, they get to thinking that what matters is what they want to offer to sell them.
Well you had your chance to do so in this interview yet explained nothing.
I dunno, they could probably so something sensible like sell the first chapter for 1/3 the price and then the rest for the other 2/3. But we all know that's not how it is going to happen, because that is not "making things more commercially viable". All the wording I've read, including Yuri's, is you pay for the first section then pay full price for the whole thing. Even if they packaged up as an extra chapter in the "demo" and a full game afterwards (i.e. "yes you pay more but you get more"), it's doomed because publishers do not have the trust of their customers, it will automatically be assumed that the "full game" has reduced content. Publishers only have their past behaviour to blame for this.
I think Crytek will become extinct.
The point being that EVERY major entertainment medium for at least a hundred years uses this model of giving a little bit away for free to create interest and to promote themselves.
You, among others, come up with this claim that every entertainment or information product involves a headline, a trailer, or some other brief facsimile served up for free, yet you ignore the other parts of the equation. I'm not sure what sort of investment or difficulty level demos involve, but I'm gonna go out on a really short limb here and say it's a lot more difficult and expensive than slapping six words at the top of the newspaper page or splicing together some shots of the completed film or television show with a voice-over.
Furthermore, demos may have simply outlived their usefulness, for consumers and publishers alike. For the publishers, demos may have an unacceptable return on investment, and even as someone who hates the capitalist system I can't request that companies simply ignore it. Even for the consumer, video game reviews are generally of higher quality and more consistency than those for other products, and I'm not sure I value a demo over simple word of mouth and professional critique.
See, I try to run on the same system. But usually it goes that I try a game off a demo or a friend's copy, and then buy it if I want to play it. Or I pirate the game to demo it.... And I just end up forgetting to buy it even if I like it. It's hard to make the jump back up from slightly dishonest to totally honest, but it's incredibly simple to make the jump from slightly dishonest to full out dishonest.
Much as I am against piracy, I agree. It is quixotic to believe that people will stop expecting demos just because game companies say so, or even because there are good reasons that demos can no longer be supported. If people want something bad enough they'll do whatever is necessary to get it. It remains to be seen whether this increases or decreases piracy of the games themselves.
CG Pin-Ups?
Stuff that would kill your progress through the game. The patches never fully fixed it. And this is what they consider progress. I pirated heavily in my youth. With a few more bucks in my pocket, I'm willing to pay for games. But if I'm going to be disappointed like this I may as well get the game for free. Piracy is always an option you fucks.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
For instance I had originally written off buying Little Big Planet, Dissidia: Final Fantasy and Half Minute Hero as all I normally use my PSP for is to play Patapon 1 and 2 (I call it my Play Some Patapon system much to the annoyance of my kids). But, on a lark I went ahead and pulled down the demos from PSN and decided that no... really I need to get these other games and they're now on my purchase list as soon as I can find them at the right price. I've bought a number of Xbox 360 games based on the demos as well (both Live Arcade games and retail sold games).
But back to the subject of EA though... I wasn't going to get into this but the more I think about it the more irritated I get... and they've been doing a good job of irritating me over the last few years.
The pinnacle of my irritation came when we tried to get a two player LAN match of Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 running at home between two Xbox 360s.
Let's summarize: 1) two Xbox Live accounts required, 2) two unique secondary logins to EA's multi player servers, 3) active/stable Internet access for both Xbox's so that they can get to the Live and EA servers... and 4) since you can rarely get two Xboxs to connect to the Internet simultaneous from a single LAN (without setting up special routing rules) I had to setup a second Internet router with my PC broadband card to give the second Xbox it's own laggy Internet connection... We ended up getting about two gaming sessions out of this nightmare before everyone got fed from jumping through the hoops and now the game is rotting on the shelf. Good job EA... You win, you got the sale and no server load!!!
Seriously? Just to play a two player LAN match? They can really just bite my ass. They truly have become the antithesis of everything Trip Hawkins set out to fight against when he created the company.
what are trailers? they provide about the same relative amount of the product before paying for it
Well put. My take on the matter is these guys are real idiots. A demo is basically a marketing tool, designed to get your product into people's hands. If they like the sample you give them they buy more. While there will be some small market segment of rabid fanbois that will pay for a demo just to start on the game a month early, most people won't bite.
Music artists are beginning to realize that albums (which yield them modest returns at best) are really just marketing tools to get people to go see their live shows (which yield them larger returns). These clowns are trying to go the other direction? wow.
Its a time investment to install and try out a new game. I am not going to pay money to experience 'advertising'
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
BitTorrent, IRC, USENET, or whatever else your favorite warez hangout might be, has 'em.
Crytek had me as a paying customer because of the free Farcry demo. I also bought Crysis after playing the free demo level for that, and purchased the expansion pack as a followup.
I did NOT purchase FarCry 2 as there was no demo to try it out and see if I liked the gameplay. Without a demo I will NOT purchase Crysis 2.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
Why would I buy a game with DRM when the cracked version gives me so much less trouble?
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
I know I'm late to the party, but I gotta say, I think they'll lose money in the long run. I am not an avid gamer and as such I try to buy games that I really like. And demos are a big part of that. Perfect example, just this weekend I downloaded the XBox 360 Blur car racing demo. I already have Forza 2 and usually don't like to buy another game that is similar to one I already have (i.e. another racing game). So without a demo, I would not have realized how incredibly fun Blur is turning out to be (it's still in Beta). I've pretty much already decided that I'm going to buy it when it comes out. Again, thanks to the demo.
Why is this a problem that only the biggest publishers in the game/movie/music industry seem to be concerned about?
"Piracy is hurting out sales, we need to monetise all our content in every way possible"
Is this not a problem of mentality?
A person can blame a nameless group for all their problems; the government, immigrants, pirates
But ultimately if these factors are outside of your control, is it not more productive to focus on the things that you CAN control instead? There will always be pirates, regardless of how much you legislate, technology always adapts to a changing environment faster than the law Accept this and find inner peace Mr Yerli
Game demos are like crack. If the game is good, you get one hit and then they know they can get $60 for you while you're chasing the dragon and the DLC will come later.
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
I always just download the whole game to try it, anyway.
So you buy the demo... and then you buy the game?
Shouldnt we get a credit towards the final game if we buy the demo?
Or do they expect us to pay twice? Why do I think they will just make us pay twice.... Because they can.
Sorry. I'll skip the demo's all together then... oh wait.. thats fucking me over too.
No thanks. FREE DEMOS or go fuck yourself.
I think pay per demo, will hurt the industry more than help.
In theory they really want the old days back when you just had to buy the game and pray it was good. They want your money even if the game sucks. Thats the bottom line. They dont want to give you any advantage when it comes to purchasing a product that is of value.
They want you to pay and pray.
Fuck em.
I remember during the DOS days, a game demo would consist of the ENTIRE first world, or an hour or so, or something. You'd play it, get hooked, and then it's ask you to pay for the full game You'd want to pay because you just spent probably a good part of an hour getting into the game, and now you want to play the rest of the awesome game.
Enter today's age of out-of-touch-with-reality game corporations. If you play the demo of Mega Man 9 on the PSN network, it lets you play one stage, and then as soon as you enter the boss gates, it stops and asks you to pay for the full game. What the hell? I don't even get to fight the boss at the end of a Mega Man stage? Fuck that.
We see movie trailers, and we can hear the singles from an album before buying the album or just the single itself. Yet that's still not a decent comparison. Movies and songs are not interactive.
Cars are interactive. You test drive a car. Power tools are interactive, and most manufacturers and home improvement stores have at least an occasional demo of their tools. Game consoles are interactive, and even discount stores like Walmart have demo units. Those console demos are often showing off demos of popular games. Golf stores let you swing a club before buying. Cell phone stores often show you a phone and let you handle it before buying, and some even have 30-day trial periods.
Anyone who thinks players will regularly drop $60 on a title they haven't been able to try out should expect to sell to a lot fewer people initially, as the rest of us will wait to try a few minutes on our friends' copies.
I'd love to ask this guy why he thinks the PC game market's in the sewer right now. It's not piracy... it's not people spending all their time playing demos instead of paying for games... It's people like him and his attitude.
I could never get their shit to work anyway.
Demo or no demo.
This is Yerli's classic shtick. Every time he wants to get free advertising for his company and their upcoming game he comes out and says something retarded about copyright infringement, because it's a controversial issue. In a pinch it can even serve as an excuse for not maintaining their existing games for their paying customers.
People illicitly download our games without paying us, therefore we will not provide free demos for our games.
The logic is air-tight, Mr. Yerli, as usual.
You want to make it even less likely that I have ever herad of, or will ever play your game?
Let's not mince words. You're trying to convince me that your game is worth $50+, or more than six movies. Your game probably has a learning curve. That learning curve intimidates me from plopping down money on it. If I play your demo, I am now over your game's learning curve, for free. You have removed an obstacle of risk and fear that was holding me back from buying your game. That is good for YOU.
Believe me, if you won't help me over the learning curve before I risk $59.95 on your game, I'm happy to go find much lower-risk, lower learning curve alternatives. I can watch movies, buy CDs, iTunes up some MP3s, or download little $4.95 casual games, all of which have a much smaller learning curve, and all of which risk less than 1/6th the monetary investment in your game if I don't like it. In a world jam-packed with alternatives, taking your free demo removes one of the few hooks you had left for me caring about your game or even knowing it exists.
Well, I never buy games I haven't played the demo for. If a studio is too scared to release a free demo of their game, it is usually a good sign that they have no confidence in their own products.
It's like movie trailers: usually if a movie appears in a cinema and there were no trailers for it, it usually turns out to be crap. And I have to say there are many really crappy games coming out these days. You simply can't take the risk when you're paying this much for one game.
Regarding the statement on piracy - sorry, I don't see the connection between demos and piracy, if anything it avoids piracy by persuading people your products are worth spending money on. And if it doesn't, you should be making better products.
I also think that studios should consider that it could be the cost of games that is leading to the whole piracy problem... If new games cost a fifth of what they do today, people wouldn't pirate as much and the studio would probably end up making just as much money anyway. So in the end, it is a problem that they have created themselves by charging as much as they do. In the past I purchased about one game a month, but the prices have gotten so ridiculously expensive that I can only buy around 3 a year now - and that happens when I play a demo that impresses me.
In conclusion: No free demo, no purchase. And if demos go extinct, I am simply going to start pirating games as well. And no, I am not going to pay for a demo...
Game demos are an afforded luxury, like movie trailers and oxygen.... Why is crytek called an indie studio, i mean once they've reached their particular status they should be called at least a 'tier 1 game company'. Indie should have left the prefix of their studios name once they put the provisional conditions on licensing their engine, check for yourself (http://mycryengine.com/index.php?conid=39). "A Game Development license is available to established games studios. We do not issue engine licenses to individuals, nor do we provide the engine for non-commerical purposes, such as Mod Teams, via this site." These people got bought out and we are all just listening to PR (attention) created from an original (indie) company, that was since bought out and made a 'machine'. Twiztid
without pirating beforehand is a waste of money. I have a stack of games on my shelf that I never played before the first level. Total waste of money. If he wants to get rid of the demos, that says something about where his games is going to end up.
If I like a game. I buy it. Then I buy the expansion. Then I buy another expansion. And then the sequel... And by expansion I mean more than 2 hours of game play for $5. Poor Bioware.... the only reason I end up with EA software is when it is given to me or I win it.
Personally, I enjoy demos because it gives me a chance to grok how the system is going to play.
I'd like to see training-type demos released: canned environments where you can use all the widgets and get a feel for game play - and determine how the game is going to run on your system, with what settings, etc.
I really don't think this will have the intended result.
Say this becomes the norm. Say all gamers are 110% against doing anything piratical. We are given a choice between having a slice of the game for $10 (maybe getting that $10 off the full game, maybe not), or we can bop over to the local rental haus and rent the full game for the same amount, or less.
Congrats, Crytek/EA/et al. I think you found a way to both increase piracy and help breathe some new life into the video game rental market in one fell swoop!
He said gamers would get a better deal with this approach. And then didn't expound. I'm still waiting... BTW I won't buy a game that costs more than $10 without a demo. All of the games I've bought in the last few years are due to playing a FREE demo and enjoying it enough to buy the game. There have been a few games I've decided not to buy based on the demo as well. So if the game industry wants all its sales to come out of the bargain bin, well then this sounds like a good plan.
This move works fine for me. Gaming from big studios was getting too expensive anyway.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Double charge instead of giving a "demo". That just means hardly anyone is gonna buy the demos
Depends how they approach this. If they make the games more episodic then the first episode should be free (like Fable2 on the xbox 360), to continue you must purchase the next episode, or the entire game.
The demos are something important in the game industry, and to remove them would seriously damage the sale of their games.
He doesn't want to have demos so he "predicts" that everybody else will do the same, since, if there is only 5 or 10 demos instead of 100, those that do have stand to gain more. More attention, more free advertising.
So, what this guy is saying, has exactly zero chance of happening.
Well, if they cut off the demos, then I stop buying their games. My game buying routine goes like this: note a cool game, either from a review or a friend, look up the demo, check that it runs on my system, check if I like it. Buy.
I can understand if they don't have free demos for consols, there you are practically garentied that the game runs as expected, but for PC's, even if the game runs it may have a bug that makes it crash every 20min due to your particular graphicscard/harddrive/t-shirt combo. And ofcause, sometimes it's just the DRM that almost deliberately fucks everything up.
Take away free demos, and I'll just get the game from TPB, And if I like it I may buy it, but maybe I won't.
EA is trying to turn the gaming industry into a money machine by fucking their costumers, when in fact they should be getting their own act together. It used to be that honest costumer had it easy, These days, the easiest way to get a game is to pirate it. Way to fight piracy.
If there's no demo, I'll get hold of a pirate copy, simple as that. I just don't buy games before I've verified that they run on my system and that they're fun.
The movie analogy is flawed. First, you don't need to check for the technical specifications - if you have two eyes, you can watch the movie, that's all you need to know. Two, they do have free demos, they just call them trailers. And no, due to reason #1, a video trailer for a game just doesn't cut it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
This guy really needs for someone to give him a clue, preferably the board of directors or stockholders. I can walk in to a bookstore and browse a book, I can also read sample chapters online at Amazon usually. I can read role-playing game rules usually. Music samples and movie samples are all over the place. I can't remember the last game that I bought without playing a demo, and I used to buy a lot of computer games. I mainly got my demos from PC Gamer, and without those demos I probably wouldn't buy the game because there is so much crap out there.
The only way I would consider buying a game demo is if they were $2 and marketed like World of Warcraft's 10 day CD. If I can walk in to Best Buy and get a copy, I'll consider it. But I'm not going to spend my money and then have to download a monster file. You'd better give me free demos, readily available cheap demos, or amazingly compelling videos of game play or I'm not giving you my bucks.
Game demos are a publicity cost. Movie posters are a cost. Ash can editions are a cost. EVERYTHING costs money to make, but can be an effective publicity tool. Even though I don't program games, it shouldn't take a huge number of hours to copy out the starting area, put in 2 or 3 weapons, and release it (at least for first person shooters, which is the main thing that I play.) Sports games and strategy games are obviously going to be different for producing a pared-down copy, but it should not be that traumatic an experience to produce it.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
This guy is an idiot. How can one say movie industry does not offer demos ? What's a trailer ?
If they won't give you demos, they will have to give you the possibility to return the game if you don't like it. Just like when you buy some other goods (maybe in some countries this can be done already?).
I just put him on the list of people that should be on the first flight to the Sun. If you tell him he can be more than a CEO there, he'll probably even pay for the trip.
Really, people should stop listening to this kind of idiots.
The only logical reason to charge for a demo as far as I can consider is either:
a) You want to charge more for your game. Essentially double billing your hardcore fans. (A good idea?)
b) You think you are 'losing' money because you make a demo, meaning that some people wont want to play it after playing the demo. Which means that your product is actually terrible.
That was Far Cry 2, which was made by Ubisoft -- a totally different company in a totally different country from CryTek (which made Far Cry 1 and Crysis).
Free Demo's
So ordinarily, this would set off an alert. "demos" is correct, because we're talking about plural of "demo", and certainly not possessive.
BUT... apostrophe also represents missing letters in a contraction. And "demo" is short for "demonstration". Looked at that way, it seems that "demo's" is right.
I'm still inclined to think it's the usual rule (demos) that applies, if only because we don't typically use demo as a shortened word -- that is, we don't say "demo' " using the " ' " to represent what's missing.
So is there someone out there who knows the answer to this one? Should we follow the usual rule, or is this really a contraction of "demo[nstration]s" thereby making "demo's" correct?
They're dreaming... of more profits. Facts remain, they're in a competitive market. If they want to charge for their advertisements, er, I mean demos, then they are free to do so. I won't pay to play a demo. I download a free demo, test it and if I like it pay to buy the real thing, the full version. I see a movie preview, for free, and if I like it pay to buy or rent the movie on DVD. Pay for advertisements? No way. He's just being greedy and dreaming.
"A free demo is a luxury we have in the game industry that we don't have in other industries such as film... Really, what this is, is an attempt to salvage a problem. The industry is still losing a lot of money to piracy as the market becomes more online-based. So it’s encouraging to see strategies outlined to combat this.'"
None of this makes any goddamn sense. It's borderline not even grammatical. Salvage a problem? Demos related to piracy?
And: game demo = movie trailer.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
And say bye-bye to the success that MW2 is.
I remember back computer games were wrote by programmers who just loved gaming. Now it's an "industry" which translates into it's a douche bag fest out to cash in on the gamer's dollars. Not that the beginning wasn't without douche bags, I plopped down way too much money on crap games back in the day. I will NOT plop down money unless I try it first now. If they take away demos, no sale. I don't have to buy their damn games. Life surprisingly has lots more to offer than computer games. Frankly its all boring now these days anyway. I don't know how many ways you can recycle the same ideas over and over and still expect people to pay for them.
Here is a clue to the industry, a lot of your sorry games aren't worth the effort to even download a demo of. Which means many of them sure aren't worth the effort to even pirate them. If they are that damn lame, what are you smoking that makes you feel entitled to put them on the shelfs and charge $50 plus for them? It's not Pirates that's taking a bite out of your douche bag expectations, it's just your own pathetic lameness. Go fuck off and die along with your bean counters. Let the gamers have their gaming back.
This discussion is as old as the home computer itself ... I still remember the problems in the 1980ies ... if you were a kid, you pirated software, b/c you couldn't afford to purchase it ... same thing across the entire software industry. Why not make software open source and finance yourself from donations ... no guaranteed revenue, but at least there won't be any piracy!
piracy as they call it is far from extinct. I honestly admit i would never buy a game before i played it. Hell i bought battlefield bad company 2 this week. But that was AFTER downloading, installing and playing the iso from someone else somewhere. This convinced me the game was worth paying for cos i will be playing this for a long, long time...
beware he who denies you access to information for in his mind, he already deems himself to be your master (SMAC-ish)
There are about 5 games I would have eventually bought if the demos hadn't convinced me that, contrary to reviews, they sucked donkey balls. And this is just in the last month. The game companies are better off bribing reviewers than risking the public finding out how shitty the games are via demos.
Movie-studios only seem to try to lure you into shitty movies nowadays. They use hype instead of quality and you are supposed to go to the theater on the first weekend - BEFORE the word has spread that the movie is total bullshit and it's out of theaters after 2 weeks...
It looks like Crytek (and esp. EA!) are trying the same thing with games. a demo would harm that strategy... if your game is good, then a demo will increase your sales. No demo = you're trying to push hyped bullshit on us!
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
... let me see I want a demo so that I can MAYBE tell if a game is a POS or actually worth bothering to buy/play. Now they think that I'll even be SLIGHTLY interested in PAYING for a demo, in which if it IS a POS (highly likely) that not only will I find out what a POS it REALLY is, but I'll also be out of cash?! WTF?!
Are good review scores getting to be so expensive to purchase that they need even MORE cash?!
Anyways, if this happens, and they think piracy is bad now, wait until they see what happens when they try to push crap through like this. It'd be like walking into a bookstore only to find that ALL of the books are sealed in those annoying (and potentially dangerous to open) plastic covers with everything but the title and author covered up, i.e. no synopsis/review blurbs for you buddy unless you cough up some cash first, non-refundable of course.
I've gone from being a poor student and having only a small gaming budget which I had to spend carefully(think bargain bin/sales) to pre-ordering title when I had cash to being burned too many time pre-ordering to not pre-ordering and waiting for user forum/usenet commentary plus reviews when they were still decent to user forum comments plus demos to what only user comments?! Many games that I'm interested don't generally, initially, generate alot of commentary unless the game in question has been mainstreamed(a bad sign right there, read dumbed down for the console kiddies with the attention spans of horny gnats), hyped to hell, and purchased glowing reviews in which case the user forums generate all sorts of laudatory praise for what really is a stinking POS that needs a demo.
e.g.
the very last time I did this, was with Oblivious which tuned out to be some sort of action-adventure first person melee instead of the CRPG I was expecting along the lines of Daggerfall and Morrowind...
Another one in my case, would be Team Fotress 2 which I expected to be MUCH more like TFC than it turned out, but fortunately I got that one for a good deal along with Portal & Episode 2, which ALMOST made the package price worthwhile.
OTOH I also picked up games like Gothic 2 (gold) and Drakensang based on few user comments AND demos w/o feeling ripped off(unlike Oblivious). (Both were MUCH cheaper to boot and MUCH better CRPGs.)
Brilliant idea. A lot of people simply buy some magazines because they offer a nice fat demo on the included CD (or, these days, DVD).
You don't want to offer any more demos, probably because you're worried that people will realize that your program is not actually what the PR claims it is.
So, instead of having a magazine increase its sales (and put your name everywhere) by a big "SuperDuperGame Demo inside!", you will... um... well... simply advertise your gane, hoping people won't be surprised when you don't offer a demo? Hoping that you won't piss off the still relatively important magazines?
Good luck.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
Companies like Nintendo have always feared demos and tightly control them. I guess they fear that demos will undermine their business model, but the thing is, they *work*. For proof that demos work look no further than the iPhone App Store. Demos are everywhere, because having no demo is the kiss of death for anything short of a heavily promoted big-publisher game (which isn't really how things are going on the iPhone). If the console companies did not have such tight control of things, I'm sure we would have had 3rd party demo discs coming out of our ears back in the 90s, and I'm sure sales would have been a lot better, especially for 3rd parties.