Would playable demos for games increase sales?

[Deleted]

As the title read, would it increase sales to let costumers try your product before purchase?

For me personally a playable demo of a game does affect the chances I will buy it greatly. Looking back to the PlayStation era (late 90's/early 2000's), I bought A LOT of games, probably 4-6 games every month. I'd like to think this was because of my subscriptions to Game Informer, PC Gamer and Playstation magazine. All three magazines featured a disc with playable demo versions of all the newest PC/PS games. Those demos were something that really used to ensnare me into the game and give me that feeling of *MUST HAVE!*. After playing finished a demo it wasn't even a debate in most cases, this game MUST be in my possession by the end of this week or I'll mentally disappear.

From the early 2000's up to this day most of these magazines disappeared one after another and with them playable demos. With their disappearance I've found myself not buying that many games anymore. As I don't get to try the games beforehand I'm really cautious with what I buy. I will only buy a game if I recognize the title and publisher and not even then is it certain I will buy it. The disappearance/decline of playable demos has really limited what type of games I expose myself to and how many games I will buy annually.

In my opinion the removal of playable demos is a bad business move. What do you think? Has the decline in playable demos affected your game consumption for better or worse?

[llDemonll]

If it wasn't a shitty game, yes.

Problem is, so many companies put out shitty games these days and rely on pre-rendered trailers and big-name companies backing them that a demo would destroy their chances of selling well.

Until people stop preordering and buying shitty games, no demos will continue.

[Deleted]

< doesn't matter if/why you pirate; don't discuss it here >

[chadwix]

F2P is the new model. Puts an end to piracy.

[Deleted]

F2P is the new model. Puts an end to piracy.

Free to play single player games? Wheres the profit?

[Sam the Wiser]

I do wish they would bring back demos. If Tera wasn't free to play I wouldn't be enjoying my self as I am now. Still all games should preview itself to the people. Just to give a taste of what its going to be like.

[Aldred]

Playable demos probably would help in some cases. Well, quite a few big games do offer playable demos actually. Although on the flip side if a game is garbage, and you let people try it out first, it's not likely to help your sales much.

Also, every game on that Ouya console will be free to try:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/3erwxilu8...ic%20Facts.pdf

[Grinderofl]

But don't you see... that's exactly what the companies DON'T want. They want to be able to push as many games to as many people as they can, stuff them with purchasable DLC (that was originally part of the game), put some freebie stuff like skins and weapon models into preorders, and then pray people are dumb enough to fall for it.

... Which they are.

So yeah, until people stop preordering and doing whatnot, there's no going companies making quality games with demos.

[Edge-]

Generally no.

http://www.vg247.com/2013/02/11/rele...-warns-schell/

Recent article about it actually.

[Fencers]

There seems to be some evidence and consensus in the industry that demos deter sales.

Extra Credits did a video on it: http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/demo-daze

And there was a major presentation at this year's GDC outlining exactly how demos hurt sales.




The point being; No, demos typically hurt sales according to industry data. Thus the market is moving away from providing trials and demos in recent years.

[Dezerte]

Removal of demos was bad for us consumers, but good for the men in suits. With that said, there are still demos for games coming out, even from companies such as EA at times. So perhaps it's not quite clear whether it's good or bad for the men in suits.

[Rennadrel]

Well most games do have demo versions available prior to release, Nintendo never really started doing the whole demo thing until recently actually, with cartridge based games and not having platforms that could easily store and support game demo's, they really lost out on that for so many years. But then again, I think game demo's worked for disc based games in the era where content quality was really starting to being the suffering that we have seen the last several years, These days you can't tell if a game is going to be bad or not unless you play a demo.

[YouAreAllWrong]

There are a lot of games that I wasn't interested or I didn't know anything about and ended up buying them after I played the demo.
But, the are also plenty of games that I decided not to buy them or bought them in a sale after a few months because I was not satisfied after playing the demo.
So kinda 50-50 I suppose.

[Gandrake]

Unlikely.

Especially when you consider how many demos are like half an hour long and don't even cover the most attractive features of the game they're trying to get you to buy.

[juzalol]

Flashy trailers and teasers + possible pre-order bonuses = infinite money

It's a lot easier to sell stuff when all the information available to the consumer is tailored
marketing material. This way you can make pretty much any game look fucking amazing
and by putting up a demo will shatter the illusion of the game not sucking shit.

[Laize]

I'm not sure playable demos would increase sales.

I know what DOES increase sales, though. Not being such a raging fuckwad about online piracy and enforcing your copyright through ways other than lawsuits and C&D orders.

Imagine, for a second, you're a game developer. You may be new, you may be old. It doesn't really matter. What's important is that you've got a game to sell. You've played it before it ever hit the shelves. You know what's in it. You couldn't STOP playing it. You think it's not just you that loves it and you're PRETTY DAMN SURE it's a REAL blockbuster title and you want to make sure you get your due.

What do you do? Well, if you're Ubisoft, you keep using a DRM method that has been decried by the gaming community as "a perfect example of what NOT to do" and keep doing it for 5 years before it begins costing you more in sales than it earns in protection. If you're EA, you develop Origin, fail to learn a single thing from Ubisoft's fuckups, and force even single-player games to utilize your "always-on" DRM.

If you're just about anyone else (Or Ubisoft after you regained your sanity), you either have some feature that offers great replayability (such as multiplayer) that can only be enabled via one-time code OR you make your game available on a service that makes purchasing the game [b]an order of magnitude faster, simpler, and (quite frequently) less expensive than if your customer had gone to a store simply allow the piracy to happen and trust that people who love your game will want your additional content down the line (You DO have additional content lined up, right?) that they couldn't get without buying the game.

There are people who have already taken this approach in other forms of media. Some dude from Asia that almost no one had ever heard of, in the West wrote a song and put it on YouTube and gave exactly zero fucks as to how much the song was pirated. That song now has 1.4 billion views on YouTube and the fact that he flat-out ignored copyright infringements is estimated to have made him an EXTRA $8.81 million over top of what he would have made otherwise.

[Deleted]

Yes, we have had some pretty shitty games in the past 10 years. Although I don't believe games were actually any better back in the days. But with a demo version of those "bad" games you actually had a reasonable clue what those 50-60 bucks went to. You didn't expect that much and you enjoyed what you bought more. Nowadays when you buy a game for 60 bucks you don't know what you're actually buying. You put your money on faith of the games concept which has been hyped to death the past year(s). When those games then turn out to be less than what you expected you feel cheated and hurt and you'll most likely boycott that publisher for many years.

I feel that developers and publishers are afraid to stand behind their work and that truly affect the final product and sales. They need to stop to be afraid of what the consumers think and start producing what THEY envisioned all along. Take these past 2 years for example. What is the new popular concept on the gaming market every developer wants in on? Open-world games and survival games! Preferably a mix between the two. Developers have become so afraid of the consumer that instead of creating their original concept they adapt it around the consumer and create what is currently the most popular concepts, in current times, open-world and survival games.

Now that every developer is putting out those type of games they put themselves in very difficult and unnecessary competition where consumers literally have hundreds of those type of games to choose from. Of course there will be winners and losers. If say, WarZ was launched 2 years from now rather than last year, it would probably have been a success. But as DayZ pretty much was first and now has monopoly on the open-world survival genre it was a giant flop. If WarZ dev's only waited some time it would have been much more successful. Same logic can be applied to recent MMO's and FPS shooters. They are willingly entering an arena with many opponents and expect to come out as the sole winner.

[Fencers]

The only difference between back in the day and now was consumers had fewer, high quality choices.

[Edge-]

The only difference between back in the day and now was consumers had fewer, high quality choices.

And far less access to marketing/PR driven promotions. If you wanted to know about a game, you had to go to the game shop or pick up a magazine, and maybe catch an ad on TV.

Now? Countless websites with news, fansites, forums, ads all over the net, PR stunts, etc. etc.

[Deleted]

Demos decrease the Sales of Games, because People can see how terrible a Game is. If a Game has a Demo you know its not completly terrible.
TB made a video on this topic and its clear that Demos will not be released as often, because people know their games are crap.