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.'"

Comments

Re:really?

[Opportunist]

Well, given Steam it's pretty easy to get demos almost "pushed" onto you, with their ads and everything. And it has actually happened more than just once that I downloaded the demo for a game that fits into my prefered genre to give it a look, then buy it.

Of course it can work in the other direction, too. If there hadn't been a demo for Supreme Commander 2, I might have bought it. But with the demo I could already easily determine that the game is as shallow as a puddle (and the reviews support that first impression), so I didn't buy.

In a nutshell, though, if you (dear studio bosses) are afraid of launching demos of your game, the message that reaches me is that I would not want to buy your game after playing the demo. Either it's just completely unoriginal (SC2, e.g.) or not going to keep me interested for longer than whatever play time the demo offers.

No demo, no sale. Easy as that. At the very least I will wait until Metacritic and similar pages fill with user reviews. The comparison with movies holds no ounce of water. First of all, I do get movie trailers that at least tell me what I could expect from the movie. And second, I don't spend 60+ bucks on a movie.