Demos: Do they Help or Hurt a Game?

IRC is starting to echo a fairly common theme lately, that of games that have had horrible off-putting demos but turn out to be pretty good (or excellent). From my personal top-ten this year, four games were cited by either myself or others to have very bad demos but later turned out to be loved: Catherine, El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron, Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom, and Resonance of Fate. Even Batman: Arkham Asylum, a game almost universally loved, had a demo that received a very tepid (or downright bad) response.

I personally don't play as many demos as some, but fishing back through my memory I can't think of a single game in recent years that I wasn't sure about, then played the demo, then said to myself "Hells yeah! Day one purchase, baybeee." Unfortunately, I've played several demos that have soured me on the game, yet I still picked them up and loved them later.

So here's a question for the goodjer collective: Do you think demos help games? Are they a necessary evil? Have you personally bought a game recently specifically because of the demo? If so, why? Have you avoided games because of the demo that you later really enjoyed?

No great philosophical statements here, but over on the Dragon Age 2 thread, there's a whole lot of hate for the demo, from people who played the game despite it, or didn't play it at all because of it.

I don't think there's a cut-n-dry answer. A good demo can help and a bad demo can definitely hurt.

I remember being thrilled about Supreme Commander, then playing the demo and losing all interest (until there was a deep discount much later). And this is an example of a demo that was representative of the final game. I was too excited about the prospect of the Total Annihilation sequel to assume that the game would not measure up... until I played the demo. It brought me from Day 1 to Day Whatever.

Tropico 3's demo got me very excited to play the full game.

I can't off the top of my head think of an instance where I liked a game and felt the demo misrepresented it. A Civ5 demo probably would have made me cancel my pre-order.

Bioshock had a fantastic demo. I'm hard pressed to think of a more recent game to use as an example, though. Brutal Legend is an interesting case. The demo is basically just the opening of the game, and it's great, but it's not particularly representative of how the rest of the game plays.
Edit: Bayonetta (at least on the 360 - I think the PS3 one was different) had a pretty good one. It was a little incoherent - it was made up of chunks of a number of different levels - but it successfully showed off the virtues of the combat system and the craziness of the story.

It depends, and the attitude towards a game should depend as well.

Some demos are poor representations of a game (DA2 demo), which might lead to some people avoiding a game they would like, or buying a game they won't like. This is a bad thing for both parties.
Then some are good representations, which lead to a correct purchase of something you like, or avoiding something you don't. This is a good thing.

It shouldn't be an automatic, demo = buy, because not all games are worth buying and not all games appeal to all people. It's a tool to help you decide.

The weird thing I see is the whole "this demo made us sell less copies" when the demo was a good representation, which reads to me that the publisher/developer is disappointed they couldn't flog their sub-par game because they said too much about it.

I suppose one angle is that games are getting very, very good at gradual progression, and a steady arc of what it expects out of the player to continue the reward train -- basically, to keep the player from getting bored. Arkham Asylum, Resonance of Fate and FF-XIII come to immediate memory. A lot of demos skip around in this progression or throw you straight into the middle of it, when you have no idea what the hell is going on, so you just hit the "punch" button or "shoot" button for an hour and wonder what the fuss is about. This style of game seems particularly ill-suited to a demo.

OTOH, as Q-Stone mentions, sim games like Tropico can work pretty well, as you can get a basic idea of the game rather quickly. Maybe it's a genre thing?

I wrote an article about demos once. Short version: all games should have demos, but that doesn't mean that all demos are good. They're the only way to really experience a game before you play it, but developers need to give you a piece of the game that's representative of the final gameplay experience.

Enslaved is a good example here. The demo for it is a straight cut of the opening, but everyone who has played it has reported back more or less the same thing: the demo isn't at all representative of the gameplay or the quality of the game as a whole. Tellingly, the demo for Enslaved is not the portion of the game used to demo the product to the press prior to release. Why they didn't use that portion for the consumer demo, I don't know.

What's become popular recently is a sort of elision demo that combines a few different parts of the game into a much smaller package, omitting the connective tissue. The demo for Arkham Asylum is like that, and so is the demo for Catherine. What this does for the player is create a very disjointed experience that doesn't engage the player or represent the product well.

Most of the time, what demos need to be are longer and larger. They need to be bigger chunks of the game that give the player a better grasp of what the complete product will entail. The gold standard here is still Darksiders, which gives players a complete dungeon from beginning to end. It's 90 minutes of content, which is just a small fraction of the final game, but it doesn't leave much question as to what the full retail package would be like.

FWIW, I never understood the hate for the Batman demo. I played it, and I was sold on the game from the very first fight I got into.

Sadly, I had the same experience with Brutal Legend, only to find out when I purchased the full game that the game they were advertising in the demo and the one they sold to me had very little to do with one another. I wanted a light 3D beat-em-up with some driving stuff and boss battles and cute DoubleFine humor, and they sold me a half-assed first-person RTS.

Not sure where this fits into the overall discussion, but something else to throw out there: publishers have destroyed the distinction between a beta and a demo. Both public and invite-only beta tests seldom seem to be used to actually test anything (other than stress-testing servers for online modes) any more, and have apparently been entirely co-opted by the marketing department. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing-- I'm all for anything that gives people a chance to try before they buy-- but it does make for an interesting shift.

The gold standard here is still Darksiders, which gives players a complete dungeon from beginning to end. It's 90 minutes of content, which is just a small fraction of the final game, but it doesn't leave much question as to what the full retail package would be like.

So that demo was pretty good, then? How was the full game?

hbi2k wrote:

So that demo was pretty good, then? How was the full game?

Oh, no you don't! Get that out of my thread.

Anecdote I may have shared in the past:
I remember playing the Demo for Destruction Derby with my little brother.
It was a time-limited demo, so basically you were thrown into a circular pit with a dozen or so other cars and after a minute the game would end.
We had hours of fun with this demo. We made up little variations on game-play where you had to get as many parts of your car flashing red without killing your car as possible. Eventually we pestered our parents enough to buy the full game and we immediately lost interest.

A full game of Destruction Derby was much less interesting because the last half of the game consisted of limping around the ring in reverse, chasing the only other car left alive that is also driving around in reverse and hoping that they get hung up on one of the dead cars littering the track since you're both trying to achieve an impact with enough oomph to finish off the other guy while crawling at roughly the same speed in the same direction.

I'll be honest, we loaded up the demo a few more times that year while the CD was gathering dust.

I pretty much only buy games with a demo, especially via steam. It has more to do with testing system compatibility than gameplay, but I absolutely will not spend money on something unless I can test, ahead of time, whether it will run or how many contortions I need to get it there.

hbi2k wrote:
The gold standard here is still Darksiders, which gives players a complete dungeon from beginning to end. It's 90 minutes of content, which is just a small fraction of the final game, but it doesn't leave much question as to what the full retail package would be like.

So that demo was pretty good, then? How was the full game?

I realize this is probably a joke, but to be clear: however I feel about the game, the demo represented it well. There are some mechanics that aren't represented, of course, but I doubt anyone who played the Darksiders demo would be the least bit surprised by anything in the full game. Your situation with Brütal Legend just wouldn't happen with Darksiders.

They've already been mentioned but my immediate first thoughts were:

Dragon Age 2 - The demo served as a checklist of all of the features that had been removed from DA:O and did little to show me that the game is still great. I finally picked it up many months later and really enjoyed it but the demo almost turned me off forever.

Brutal Legend - It's a demo for a different game.

I think ClockworkHouse is right though, demos need to be as long as they need to be, which is usually longer than they are. If your game is hard to get across in 30 minutes then it needs to be longer. If that's giving away too much of the game because your game is short then that's a design problem.

Going in a different direction, but I'm always bemused when a developer/publisher moans that demos are hard or there's not enough time/money budgeted for one. That just strikes me as bad planning and management, which is endemic in game development anyway. A demo is marketing, trying to attract people to buy your game, so if you're going to spend the odd few million in 'traditional' advertising, then make a traditional demo too.

At this point, I've gotten used to demos coming out well after the game is released that I just don't care about them. By that point, and because my pile size pushes me to buy during sales, I can rely on word of mouth.

Miashara wrote:

I pretty much only buy games with a demo, especially via steam. It has more to do with testing system compatibility than gameplay, but I absolutely will not spend money on something unless I can test, ahead of time, whether it will run or how many contortions I need to get it there.

That's a very good point, especially when some publishers seem to like to under-represent the system requirements for PC games to get people with low-end systems on which a game will technically run (if you can call putting all settings on Low and still getting framerate chugs during action-packed sequences "running") to buy.

I know that I waited on Civ V until I had a whole new system because my old rig, while technically meeting the minimum specs (if barely), could not run the demo at acceptable levels of performance.

I've been sold on a large number of games based on their demo's over the years, and even moreso in the last few via Steam, and even once for Picross (3D?) on the DS. On Steam, Shadowgrounds and Just Cause 2 jump to mind.

Demo's work, but it's the developer's responsibility to represent the game properly. If they can't, then there's probably some other issues there and I've got too many other games to play to care.

I also really liked the Batman: Arkham Asylum demo.

I can count the number of times that I've bought a game on the strength of a demo, only to be disappointed. As mentioned upthread, Brutal Legend sits atop that small pile.

Far more common an occurrence, however, is that a demo will turn me onto a game that hadn't been on my radar, or cement a pre-existing buy/not-buy decision.

XBLA is the area where demos become the main way that I decide what to buy, rather than pre-release hype or post-release reviews.

Oh, one more.. the demo of Lionheart convinced me not to buy it, even though it was theoretically right up my alley (Fallout/Arcanum-esque Medieval Historical RPG?)

Remember the Battlefield 1942 demo? I'm pretty certain that it contributed substantially to sales of the game.

Jonman wrote:

Far more common an occurrence, however, is that a demo will turn me onto a game that hadn't been on my radar, or cement a pre-existing buy/not-buy decision.

Like what? Remember any specific examples?

I bought Outland on the strength of it's demo. I feel like I'm generally more willing to buy based on a demo if the game is cheap.

I remember one of the X-series games... I want to say X3:Reunion... had just a technical demo. It loaded up some in-game ships and stations and just did a fly around, marking your FPS and such. Let you adjust options before you run it.

At least that's the bare minimum that needs to be released for PC games. Something to let you know in real-time that your system can handle the game. Because we all know specs don't always tell the whole story.

There have been a lot of smaller games that just give you a time-limited demo. Here's the full game, play for 90 minutes or something. Those can be great, especially when it keeps your save file, so that if you upgrade to the full game, you can continue where you left off and not have to repeat parts. Those demos are much more appealing than the "here's the tutorial, now here's a map from 1/3 through the game, now here's a map from 2/3 through the game" where your powers don't' make sense, and you really have no idea what you're doing. Those suck.

There's equal odds of both for me. There's a lot of demos that have unsold me on games over the years, and there's probably just as many that sold me.

Off the top of my head, I can think of very few games I've purchased because of a good demo or been disabled on because of a bad demo. However, I can think of several demos that have given me just enough game that I got the jist of the experience and didn't really need to purchase the game to get more.

I have been finding the Giant Bomb Quick Looks to be much more valuable tools for evaluating my purchasing decisions lately.

For me personally generally the demo has ruined my interest in a game.

Examples:

Batman: Arkham Asylum - I played the demo and hated it. It felt like a brawler and didn't do justice to the later levels. I picked up Arkham City on a lark because it was open world. Otherwise I would have ignored it. I played Arkham City (full game purchase, so I was invested) and really liked it. I've since gone back and picked up AA. I'm playing it now and I love it. I think it's better than AC. So I basically ignored it until 2012 because of the demo.

Eternal Sonata, Enslaved and many other games - There are a whole gaggle of C+ to B- level games where I've played the demo, said "meh" and ignored it.

Madden 2012, Warhammer: Space Marine and many other games - There are quite a few games where the demo was enough for me. Where I actually liked the demo, but I played enough to say I'd probably like that, but not as much as this pile over here.

The only counter example I can think of is Crackdown. Crackdown was the demo that lead to me buying one of my favorite games this generation.

Minarchist wrote:
Jonman wrote:

Far more common an occurrence, however, is that a demo will turn me onto a game that hadn't been on my radar, or cement a pre-existing buy/not-buy decision.

Like what? Remember any specific examples?

I'd estimate well upwards of 80% of everything I've bought off of XBLA has been as a result of the demo. Even with XBLA games that had some pre-release buzz (like Bastion or Shadow Complex), the final buy/not buy decision is nearly always made after playing the demo. Even Lara Croft: GOL, that we played through together, wouldn't have gotten a look-in if it wasn't for a demo.

Some retail games that I absolutely wouldn't have bought if it wasn't for a demo: Bladestorm, Split/Second, Just Cause 2, Vanquish, The Club, Pure, Operation Darkness. As you can see, these often tend to be significantly-less-that-AAA games that would otherwise get lost in the churn.

There's actually very few games that I'll buy purely on the strength of a review or buzz, and they tend to be shoe-ins in genres that I'm keen on (e.g. rhythm games, Dark Souls, Bethesda and Bioware games)

Dyni wrote:

However, I can think of several demos that have given me just enough game that I got the jist of the experience and didn't really need to purchase the game to get more.

DSGamer wrote:

For me personally generally the demo has ruined my interest in a game.

Isn't that generally a good thing? If a demo can't grab you, assuming it's a good demo then you avoided a game you wouldn't have fully enjoyed. And as people are mentioning, a demo is just one of many sources of information you can use to find out if you'll like a game and you can still pick it up at a later date.

Scratched wrote:
Dyni wrote:

However, I can think of several demos that have given me just enough game that I got the jist of the experience and didn't really need to purchase the game to get more.

DSGamer wrote:

For me personally generally the demo has ruined my interest in a game.

Isn't that generally a good thing? If a demo can't grab you, assuming it's a good demo then you avoided a game you wouldn't have fully enjoyed. And as people are mentioning, a demo is just one of many sources of information you can use to find out if you'll like a game and you can still pick it up at a later date.

It's a good thing for me. Not sure if it's good or bad for the developers. I'd like to think it's best for them to find satisfied customers, so it's probably a good thing all around. Depends on what one means by that I guess.

I should ammend what I said, though, as I have bought quite a few XBLA games based on trials. That feels different. I try out a game that costs $5 - $10. I have enough fun that I decide the extra $5 - $10 for a little more fun is worth it.

Scratched wrote:
Dyni wrote:

However, I can think of several demos that have given me just enough game that I got the jist of the experience and didn't really need to purchase the game to get more.

DSGamer wrote:

For me personally generally the demo has ruined my interest in a game.

Isn't that generally a good thing?

For me, yes. For the game, not so much.

It's not even necessarily true that the demo didn't grab me. For instance, the Just Cause 2 demo was just the game with a 30 (or 60?) minute timer. I had a blast with that demo. I think I played it 4 or 5 times, but that was enough for me. Yes, I would have gotten more guns, cars, and upgrades in the full game, but there weren't any significant gameplay elements I was missing out on by just playing through the demo a few times. It was enough to tide me over until a $5 Steam sale.

Given the number of times I've been sadly disappointed by a game, I refuse to buy a game without a demo. If a developer/publisher can't be bothered to put out a decent demo, that says enough right there that I'm not paying full price.