Whatever Happened To Game Demos?

[fabius]

...i have to confess that i my case somehow (missing) demos had been replaced by good "Let's Play"-video series (not trailers, reviews, or short AARs)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.

[Ian C]

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.

[BanzaiCat]

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!

[Gusington]

I really miss PC gaming mags. And of course Coconut Monkey.

[Bison]

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. 

[Gusington]

Yeah me too. I can still smell the shop where I got my copies of Gunship, Tank Platoon, Bards Tale, etc.

[fabius]

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.

[Barthheart]

/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.

/old man rant off

[Sir Slash]

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.

[MengJiao]

...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.

[Cyrano]

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)

[Bison]

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.

[Cyrano]

...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)

[BanzaiCat]

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.)

[FarAway Sooner]

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.