Forgive me if this sounds like a whine, but as a middle-aged gamer this is my right ;)
Why don't companies release demos any more? Why do I have to take a chance and gamble every time a new game is released? Even after positive reviews, after five minutes of play when I realise it's not my kind of game I'm screwed because of the No Refund policy.
This is kind of an underhanded cheat from the companies. They know they are assured a sale with people who would not ordinarily buy the game if they had experienced play and decided its not for them. They have withdrawn the chance for people to sample before purchase, and this is a stinky passive rip-off tactic.
"Dude, you should have read all the reviews and watched Youtube" does not cut it, because it's no substitute for hands-on gameplay.
They do release demos...they just call them early access and charge for them.
I think you answered your own question - a demo lets you see what you're getting before paying your hard earned
No demo means you give the dev his money whether you like it or not
There are definitely a lot less demos now than there were a few years ago. Too bad as playing the demo most of the time convinced me to buy the game instead of now just waiting for other people's comments.
Quote from: Jarhead0331 on May 14, 2015, 01:52:24 PM
They do release demos...they just call them early access and charge for them.
I think the idea of finishing a game has gotten a little iffy from the development point of view. Early Access gives you some idea of what the game is like at least.
And good game manuals. Don't forget to ask what happened to those as well.
Quote from: undercovergeek on May 14, 2015, 01:54:10 PM
I think you answered your own question - a demo lets you see what you're getting before paying your hard earned
No demo means you give the dev his money whether you like it or not
This!
I read some quoted research that Demos actually reduce sales.
I think the psychology is that until we actually play the darn things we can project all kind of potential aspirations onto them.
Fabius nailed it. I can think of no demo that convinced me to buy a game that I was ambivalent about. They typically gave me just enough of the game that my ADHD head could convince itself that I could live without them and move on to the next squirrel.
There were even some demos that convinced me I did not want a game.
Besides, remember, we're lucky to be a niche market over here in PC land. Consoles rule the world and you get just about nothing vis-a-vis demos from those folks. "Sixty bucks m-er f-er or you ain't cool no more. Oh, princess wants a DEMO? F you."
Manuals were a thing of a different time, I honestly don't miss them much.
I just wish we could get a piece of that sweet, sweet secondary market action the console gamers get through GameStop and the like.
Best,
Jim
"Cyrano"
:/7)
...i have to confess that i my case somehow (missing) demos had been replaced by good "Let's Play"-video series (not trailers, reviews, or short AARs)
and sometimes actually with the effect Fabius and Cyrano described.
i have seen some hours of gameplay and the urge to get the game NOW! somehow had disappeared ...and it may went on the wishlist, and maybe i get it on the (over)next Steam sale, if a certain threshold in price reduction is reached.... or never.
I occasionally see a Demo available for something on Steam these days, but it's usually one of the simpler or one of the genres that aren't quite my preference.
JH took the words right out of my mouth. Now get off my lawn.
Quote from: Jarhead0331 on May 14, 2015, 01:52:24 PM
They do release demos...they just call them early access and charge for them.
This.
Demos? I just had a flashback to the old PC Gamer Disk with Coconut Monkey.
Coconut MONKEY!!!
A most excellent get, sirrah!
"I would gladly hug you...but I have no arms..."
Quote from: MikeGER on May 14, 2015, 04:31:30 PM
...i have to confess that i my case somehow (missing) demos had been replaced by good "Let's Play"-video series (not trailers, reviews, or short AARs)
and sometimes actually with the effect Fabius and Cyrano described.
i have seen some hours of gameplay and the urge to get the game NOW! somehow had disappeared ...and it may went on the wishlist, and maybe i get it on the (over)next Steam sale, if a certain threshold in price reduction is reached.... or never.
Never looked at it that way MG, but it's that way for me too...I often watch let's play vids on youtube as if they were demos.
Quote from: MikeGER on May 14, 2015, 04:31:30 PM
...i have to confess that i my case somehow (missing) demos had been replaced by good "Let's Play"-video series (not trailers, reviews, or short AARs)
and sometimes actually with the effect Fabius and Cyrano described.
i have seen some hours of gameplay and the urge to get the game NOW! somehow had disappeared ...and it may went on the wishlist, and maybe i get it on the (over)next Steam sale, if a certain threshold in price reduction is reached.... or never.
Two things
1. Let's plays. Most of them give me enough to say I think I'd like or not like that. I find them helpful.
2. Wish List on Steam. I notice last week that this has saved me a small fortune.
I add games to it as a tracker for early access games and wait-area for sales of full games.
But, there are many that go on there that are for a passing itch. Or are only half the game I want. So the wish list acts as a break to impulsive buying and I deleted a lot of wish list games last week.
Some examples. Star Drive and Star Ruler. I have a space 4x itch- both looked to have potential so on the list. But forum and lets plays revealed both to have flaws that would not meet my itch. So I'm waiting for the Mandate, and to see whether Predestination cooks good or DW goes on sale.
Supreme Ruler. I know it's game mechanics and AI are super pants- but I Need a modern grand strategy. So on the list it went for weeks. The sale didn't come, an din that time I realised I would get frustrated with 10000s units micro, etc and deleted.
Case in point: Gal Civ 3. Some say yay and some say nay. For me, a demo would settle it. Also, early access doesn't fit the bill. I've bought early access only to see a game abandoned or turn out crap. Maybe it's just me, but I'd like to have all choices in front of me before making an informed choice to buy. A test drive is always nice.
I agree with Let's Plays. They've helped me to make many purchase and non-purchase decisions.
Back in the day you were pretty screwed (say late 80s/early 90s). Unless a product was defective, a software store wouldn't do a refund return. You relied a LOT on word of mouth and game magazine reviews. At least Babbage's let us play the games/check them out to take home and try out, at least for a while. All the better to talk up product and sell it.
I miss the simpler times when I had to walk five miles in the snow uphill both ways to get my gaming magazines!
I really miss PC gaming mags. And of course Coconut Monkey.
I miss book store style gaming stores. Row upon row of shelves with game boxes. I read the back of each box diligently. Thumbed through the latest gaming magazine. And made a blind purchase, which good or bad I played the hell out of the game.
Yeah me too. I can still smell the shop where I got my copies of Gunship, Tank Platoon, Bards Tale, etc.
Quote from: Bison on May 15, 2015, 07:00:21 AM
I miss book store style gaming stores. Row upon row of shelves with game boxes. I read the back of each box diligently.
Ah those were the days.
Ian C. I still try demos when available. Especially if new to the genre or Dev. But the Lets plays supplement that and explain stuff that is often hard to fully get from a demo that is either feature or time limited.
Scourge of War is one where the demo has left me on the fence. I saw enough to think I could get into that. But UI (and not being so into US Civil War) has left me not buying it yet because I've yet to have the inclination to invest time into learning the system.
/old man rant
I find that I can't watch Let's Play vids. The "operator" is either moving too slow over what I'm not interested in or too fast over what I am. They tend to jerk around the screen and babble on about crap I don't care about.
Also, as someone else said, my play time is small so I don't like watching someone else play when I should be. Demo's let you do this.... or used too.
:tickedoff:
/old man rant off
Dungeon Siege was a game that looked terrible to me but after the demo, I couldn't get it fast enough. Let's Play's are better than demos for getting a feel for a game for me. Except for the rants. Having had an Intellivision, 3DO, and Amiga, I well know that Back-Shelf feeling when your gaming systems begins to approach extinction at the local store.
Quote from: MikeGER on May 14, 2015, 04:31:30 PM
...i have to confess that i my case somehow (missing) demos had been replaced by good "Let's Play"-video series (not trailers, reviews, or short AARs)
and sometimes actually with the effect Fabius and Cyrano described.
i have seen some hours of gameplay and the urge to get the game NOW! somehow had disappeared ...and it may went on the wishlist, and maybe i get it on the (over)next Steam sale, if a certain threshold in price reduction is reached.... or never.
My confession is: I like early access. For example I paid 12 dollars for ARMAIII and played lots of nutty early stuff.
The first game I ever bought was a cassette-based copy of Tanktics from a local grocery store.
I remember when Amiga magazines from Europe were a coveted commodity because they came with both game and tech demos, the latter showcasing the then-mighty graphic processing power of the Amiga. As well as Todd Rundren videos.
I reveled in the era of well-stocked PC game stores and the demos that came with the great Coconut Monkey.
These days, i can't abide the Let's Play gits and their twitch cams. As my wife, a video producer by trade, is fond of pointing out, not every one with a camera and MacBook Pro is suddenly transformed into a Spielberg...or an Ed Wood for that matter. That said, there are some reviewers -- Out of Eight comes to mind -- that do a better job than most at it.
Damn, Coconut Monkey...I bet I kept some of those CDs.
Best,
Jim
"Cyrano"
:/7)
That reminds me of the old PC Gamer magazine that'd include a cd with game demos. I don't ever recall buying a game that was a demo, but hey it got me to buy a number of their magazines.
...and, as if I haven't typed enough on this, Meng reminded me.
I disagree that early access = demos. There's a very good 3MA podcast on the dynamics of EA -- those who love it and those who don't -- but all agreed that it's much more about financing the late-stage development of games and even, in the best cases, providing broad BETA test beds than anything else.
In the world of Steam we live in, developers want on the front page in the worst way. They can get there out of EA and then at final. The best ones take the period in between to develop and polish. The worst never finish and leave their games in pieces on the ground.
Frankly, I see EA much more like a KS game I actually get to play, and I go in knowing it might never be done.
Best,
Jim
"Cyrano"
:/7)
Barth - I agree to an extent that some Let's Play vids are too chaotic. The only Let's Play series I ever watched from beginning to end was the Alien: Isolation one. I enjoyed it a lot because the player did not say one word the entire time, just played. Unlike idiots like PewDiePie or whatever the hell his name is. SHUT UP AND SHOW ME. I get tired a lot of long-winded intros, too...
I think my first game purchase was Zork for a TRS-80. It came in a plastic baggie with a cardboard insert. I can't remember where I bought it, but I bet it was the local Radio Schlock.
I worked at Babbage's in North Star Mall in San Antonio from 1988 to early 1990. I was struck by the fact that North Star was a very, very upscale mall at the time (no idea if it still is but I know it's still there), so the clientele wasn't your normal mouth-breathers or time-wasters. A lot of our customers were well-off Mexican nationals that came up to S.A. to spend money and go home with the fruits of their purchases. Many of them came into our store to buy tons of Nintendo (the original system) cartridges. When I came on board at that store, Super Mario 2 had JUST come out, so I was introduced to the world of insane game buyers. The store and the customers were good, except for when we had sale events like that, or some new heavily-anticipated game came out for Nintendo.
We had rows of IBM software, and that was our largest wall, but we also had the aforementioned Nintendo section, Amiga, Mac, Apple II, and even C64 stuff at the time. I did a lot of the display design for the store and did screen prints from our store computer of games to help illustrate things (I remember doing a lot of that for a big F-19 display I did). We had monitors at the front of the store that played VHS tapes of the latest games, and F-19 was one of them. Those monitors drew a lot of people in.
I miss that job. We had access to some great games, and had an employee discount, even on special orders. There was a Luby's right across from us, a Walgreen's one one side and a record store on the other, and a few steps further down, a B Dalton's bookstore. It was pretty much a nexus of awesome at that time in my life. I even went in on days off to play around on the store PC or do stuff for the displays, because I liked it so much. (I also did not have my own PC at the time, so there was that, and the mall was on the way home for me from college, so...)
After Babbage's this little mall called Rolling Oaks opened up on the far northeast side of San Antonio. It's still there, off of Loop 1604 and Nacodoches Road. I got a job at the Electronics Boutique, which was right by the food court. To the other side was a small shop that sold college gear like shirts, hats, those terrible Monopoly games themed after various schools, and so forth. At that college store was a guy that I got to be good friends with; he'd often come to work wearing slippers, but stylized ones like dragon's feet or lion's feet or silly crap like that. Dude was hilarious. Across from me was a Payless Shoe store and a hot woman I pined for but never had the guts to talk to. That job was a GOOD one, because the mall was SLOOOOWWWWW. It had just opened and nobody knew about it. On a four-hour shift I'd be lucky to get two people to walk into my store, and I'd work it by myself. I'd close, had keys, handled deposits, and there were maybe four or five of us total on staff. THAT was a cush job, but it bored the piss out of me so I quit after about four months. That was dumb, I should have milked it for all it was worth, because I could get homework done or study for a good solid block of time and not be interrupted. But silly me, a boring work environment never did it for me.
Sorry for the lengthy post, this talk just reminded me of some good times. (Demented and sad, but social.)
Good stuff, Banzai_Cat! Brings back some memories for me, though not in El Paso...
I do think Let's Play videos have largely replaced Demos. I'm ambivalent on that. I think the big challenge is that game design has become much more ruled by scarce resources. Building a demo takes time, and nobody seems to have time to build a demo in front of a game. Combine that with the aforementioned research, and I can see why game designers hesitate to release demos.
If you have a good game, I think a demo is a great move. It pushed me off the fence on Eador: Genesis and the original AI Wars, and got me to take the plunge on Bionic Dues as well as Civilization: Beyond Earth, Loren: Amazon Princess, plus a couple of the Soldak titles (Din's Curse and Drox Operative). But it drove me not to buy Panzer Corps, Battlefield Academy, or Unity of Command (although the latter still might be an eventual buy for me).
My take-away from that is that, for games that offer something a little different, a demo is a great selling tool, whereas games that try to take a tried-and-true approach and polish it up a little, they're likely to lose my business.
I'm definitely a lets play guy - I can get everything I need from watching someone play, in the olden days you would probably be sat next to a mate sharing and watching each other play anyway, I don't need that hands on experience to want it
Let's play has won and lost me a fortune, recently lets play got me over the final push for CMBS, invisible inc, endless legends and elite
It's also helped me avoid ai war, sid meiers starships, a variety of 4x space games I now know aren't for me
Quote from: Banzai_Cat on May 15, 2015, 06:48:15 AM
I agree with Let's Plays. They've helped me to make many purchase and non-purchase decisions.
Same.
It's good to see some publishers sending review copies to YouTube LP'ers too. An increasing trend.
They've obviously realized it as a better representation of a demo, since they can show the full-featured game played by some other gamer (not a dev) who doesn't necessarily know everything about it. Also... basically free advertising.
Quote from: Nefaro on May 15, 2015, 10:45:33 AM
It's good to see some publishers sending review copies to YouTube LP'ers too. An increasing trend.
They've obviously realized it as a better representation of a demo, since they can show the full-featured game played by some other gamer (not a dev) who doesn't necessarily know everything about it. Also... basically free advertising.
But isn't a demo a review copy for the
buyer? That's my point. The best review is your own.
Quote from: Bison on May 15, 2015, 07:00:21 AM
I miss book store style gaming stores. Row upon row of shelves with game boxes. I read the back of each box diligently. Thumbed through the latest gaming magazine. And made a blind purchase, which good or bad I played the hell out of the game.
Amen, brother. It may be utterly foolish, but I do miss those days.
Quote from: Barthheart on May 15, 2015, 07:26:59 AM
/old man rant
I find that I can't watch Let's Play vids. The "operator" is either moving too slow over what I'm not interested in or too fast over what I am. They tend to jerk around the screen and babble on about crap I don't care about.
Also, as someone else said, my play time is small so I don't like watching someone else play when I should be. Demo's let you do this.... or used too.
:tickedoff:
/old man rant off
Let's Play vids are real hit-and-miss for me. Some work, some don't. I think much -- if not all -- depends on the person doing the video.
There are a couple simple answers to this question (some already covered here too):
1). A demo doesn't translate to more sales. Kinda important for indie Devs to consider.
2). Over the past three decades, we have seen a reversal of big 24/7 companies versus indie Devs. The more niche the genre today, the more likely it was an indie Dev team making the game.
3). The big names in war gaming today are the publishers and distribution companies. Back in the day it was SSI, Microprose, EA, etc.. Now it's Steam and Matrix. The entire model has changed and adapted over the decades.
4). From the Dev side of things, a demo means spending precious time making a new release with functionality turned off or other safeguards turned on to make a viable demo. It can be a bigger challenge if you are not coding a game with that in mind out of the gate. Even if the demo goes out it will always be a broken version of the evolving game code. More bugs and features will be a part of the release that a demo never sees. Unless you again burn critical reasourses updating a demo as well. The final kicker these days is item 1) on this list.
5). Explosion of social media. The vast global reach of the Internet puts you as a gamer, pretty much face to face with the Devs in a way that was impossible back inthe good ole days. I think we forget that those CDs in the game mags had patches for games too. If you were lucky. Back then the only way a bug was squashed is if the company's people found it and fixed it. Today we can chat in near real time, talk to Devs, talk to people from around the world, get insight to events and items those Devs thirty years ago would dream of.
Take the good with the bad and move on. The Demo is dead. Long live the Demo.
Hi Jim, got your game, love it.
Quote from: Capn Darwin on May 15, 2015, 11:45:09 AM
There are a couple simple answers to this question (some already covered here too):
1). A demo doesn't translate to more sales. Kinda important for indie Devs to consider.
I'm not a dev nor do I make money from software (although I was head of marketing for a major music software company) , so as a customer, this point is irrelevant to me and other customers. You are right though, a demo won't translate to more sales, in fact, less, since it could be a deciding factor on some of us deciding not to purchase. Let me be more accurate - I'm not beefing specifically about indies, but majors.
Quote4). From the Dev side of things, a demo means spending precious time making a new release with functionality turned off or other safeguards turned on to make a viable demo. It can be a bigger challenge if you are not coding a game with that in mind out of the gate. Even if the demo goes out it will always be a broken version of the evolving game code. More bugs and features will be a part of the release that a demo never sees. Unless you again burn critical reasourses updating a demo as well. The final kicker these days is item 1) on this list.
Agreed. I see your point, that investing more in making demos will yield no material returns, but it will win respect for allowing us the chance to sample first and for us to have all options for making an informed decision. Transparency is important.
Customers are not concerned about the behind-the-scenes cost savings, but the front-end of the product. If funds are an issue, charge slightly more for the game, to cover costs.
Honestly, out of over 100 games I own on STEAM, there are perhaps 30 I would not have bought if I'd had chance to play a demo, and that's including reading reviews and watching Youtube before buying them. I always read reviews before purchase but sometimes, a video is not good enough. Especially when you don't know exactly
who is reviewing them and whether they are unbiased and independent.
QuoteTake the good with the bad and move on.
Thanks for your reply Jim.
Quote from: Cyrano on May 14, 2015, 09:14:15 PM
Coconut MONKEY!!!
A most excellent get, sirrah!
"I would gladly hug you...but I have no arms..."
I'm still eagerly awaiting the release of Gravy Trader.