The Demo Is Dead, Long Live The Demo

Something I have been meaning to do an editorial about for a while is game demo's, spurred on by PuppyGames blog posts on it (here and here) about them not supplying demo's for any of their games.

They make some interesting points mostly because they are talking about themselves and how demo's just didn't work for them.

QuoteThis formula was: offer a demo, and convert demo players into customers by having amazing demos (and, as a secondary, offer a money back guarantee just in case a customer mysteriously wasn’t satisfied). All you need is a large enough influx of traffic downloading a large enough number of demo’s and a large enough conversion rate. Simple! And this we have done, for the last 10 years.

To cut a long story short, it doesn’t work for us.

Today, none of our games have a demo, and they probably never will have again, either. The Demo is dead.

Now I understand how times have changed since we have video's that can show you more than a demo could, after all you can skip to different parts of a video and see if you find it interesting or not. Sadly though I do disagree with them and not providing any demo's because how else are you supposed to check if a game will actually work on your system? Especially on Linux as even when using the same Distribution we may have slightly different configurations and the game may flat out just not work, a video cannot show you this (after all most videos will probably be of the game on Windows).

Also you need to take into account services like Steam, they seem to only offer a one time customer service gesture refund if you aren't happy with your purchase (or accidental purchase in my case of a whole bundle of games before), so if the game doesn't work on your system or it is full of bugs the developer isn't going to fix then you may be flat out of luck as you didn't get a demo to test it so that's your hard earned money wasted isn't it?

It does seem to be working for them though:

QuoteThere’s no harm in being wrong. We can be wrong. We’re going on what the data tells us, and we have a lot of data. We’ve sold 481,529 games in the last 3 years, and 30,246 of those have been to people who played a demo. That means the other 451,283 sales were made without anyone ever seeing a demo. If you want percentages, that’s 6%. We’re quite happy to be proved wrong! If the data tells us we’re wrong, we’ll go back to using demo’s.

The problem is that if you want to test it without a demo what choice do you have? You buy it. So it's no wonder it is working for them.

Personally I do buy plenty of games that don't have a Demo so maybe they are right, I do always prefer to have a Demo first and If I like the game I do tend to buy it.

What are your thoughts faithful GOL readers? Do you think demo's aren't needed or like me do you think they will always have a place?

Also to make this a point, I am a fan of puppygames (especially Revenge of the Titans) this is a general editorial not an invitation for anyone to bash them. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.