If I may be blunt/honest: Not everyone can afford to be as moralistic as you think they should be, sadly, and imo they shouldn't be looked down upon that much(by people in general, not you specifically per se) for not living to such an ultra high standard.

And empathy/conscience doesn't usually pay the bills or put food on people's plates, even if it would be nice if it did.

Agreed....now let's hope we see some nice games added to the store this year along with much needed site fixes/etc. :)

oh, there are definitely good demos out there. i agree with that, but they tend to have had a lot of work put into them. for many games that's often an expense more than the budget allows, especially smaller teams. and many indie games that are short and rely on a single gimmick, that can be fantastic as a full, short, game simply can't do a demo without basically giving their entire game away.

imo the best days were when we got episode 1 of doom as shareware and you paid for episode 2 and 3. but i can see why companies aren't willing to go to that extreme anymore.

don't get me wrong. i wish there were demos for everything that displayed them truthfully and accurately, but reality intrudes unfortunately :P

Sure, indie developers operate on tight budgets. For them, it is a matter of cost-benefit to decide whether they make a demo or not. A purely managerial decision.

That taken into account, consider Spiderweb and Jeff Vogel. He has been there for more than 25 years. He knows one thing or two about staying afloat. He cuts costs to the bare minimum, always aware of the marginal profit of investments. He's been called a cheapskate by some; he calls it business sense and proves it with numbers. Well, this guy, who runs a basically one-person operation, with his wife helping to manage hired artists, still offers demos of this games, as he thinks demos are required for his indie developer business model.

Conclusion: it remains an open matter, with success stories supporting the notion that good demos help selling games.

I'd happily agree with that. Good demos certainly help. If more companies could put out a good demo it'd be great :)

I meant for businesses where their duties to their shareholders can be a thing they have to adhere to, or where they need to make tough choices to pay the bills/keep a store or site running/etc.

You say what you say as you are someone sitting on the sidelines(same as most of us) looking in without actually having the experience of having to be in such a position and make such calls.

Of course, we all do it, to be fair(make such outside observer judgments)...things still aren't as easy to do as we think they are/can be in all situations, though.

It's easy to say such things(as I said) when one is an outside observer and doesn't have to make such calls.....it's often much more difficult for the people that have to do so.

Being/doing nice is good to do/should be encouraged, but I also feel people shouldn't be shamed or forced into doing nice things.

Also morals don't pay the bills or fill our bellies....by saying that I am not saying people should not be moralistic, i'm just trying to show that that is just how the world is.

It is actually more normal to preserve one's self and think of one's self...that is human nature.....being moral and thinking of others(that aren't family or friends) is often running counter to our natures(not that that's always a bad thing).

Also your logic is a bit flawed....people aren't bad just because they think of themselves over others from time to time.

It's the other way around. The costs of creating demos rise disproportionately with increasing project complexity. It's far easier and cheaper to create demos for most indie games than it would be for AAA or AA games, especially versus other material that fulfils the purpose of demos more effectively, like creating good footage - a tool that used to be much more expensive to produce than demos but now is of course pretty cheap by comparison, with video editing having become possible on virtually any machine, the necessary software being cheap and anyone being able to distribute video via streaming platforms. Although the truth is that even trailers are often ridiculously expensive to produce and creating a section of a game that is gameplay trailer-worthy has consumed major portions of many game budgets - it only gets amplified in case of demos which must be foolproof and bug free (with gameplay trailers the developer is of course in control and can largely avoid showing the things that suck or aren't finished).

Of course there's nothing wrong with your reasoning concerning demos, it's just common-sense and exactly the kind of thinking that lead most developers to making demos in the 90s and early 2000s. Reality has turned out very different and even counter-intuitive, however. There is tons of factual evidence on the counter-productivity of demos and by now it's quite common knowledge among developers and publishers that demos are not only harmful by default but making a "good" demo that even actually does have the potential to increase sales is exceptionally hard and expensive. Even some of the best sections of games often become unsatisfying out of context, possibly most modern games are built around lengthy progression which cannot unfold in a demo - the reasons are numerous.

I think the first major wake-up call on this matter was Jesse Schell's talk at D.I.C.E. 2013. Schell is one of the most important academics related to video games and studied tons of data on this matter and also provided some explanations on the psychological phenomena that typically make demos harmful to sales. And of course all major publishers have done their own extensive research on this matter. You can't beat that with anecdotal evidence.

Demos may make sense in the case of some games but that's those games whose main appeal is hard or even impossible to convey without letting people actually play them (which is extremely rare, however) - and even then players' attention must first be caught via other means since nobody will try a demo when there's a million games out there that convince people to buy them without the need for a demo. Jeff Vogel's games probably fit the bill for games which need to let the player try to make a sale, considering their abysmal presentation and specific nature, but frankly I think Vogel may be falling into common fallacies like assuming that because many people try his demos before buying the game they would not have bought the game without the demo.

One of the biggest problems with demos is that they satisfy the player's urge to "try for himself". Even though a player may be more convinced after playing a demo that a game will satisfy them, that urge that tells them to try the game is usually gone afterwards. Not giving players a demo is not immoral, it's not a cover-up of bad quality - especially in this age of user scores and streaming video it is impossible to cover up bad quality this way anyway - it's just about having that "I need to try this" impulse flow naturally into playing the actual game. Trailers generally manage to convince potential players to buy a game without satisfying that urge - and of course it's why F2P is so effective: the barrier of entry is minimised and players are far more fluidly lead from trying the game to paying for it than in the case of traditional demos.

About the video... Was waiting for it....

...You call that factual evidence. That video is old, old news, and has been cited befor in this very same forum about the same topic. Check how it was alluded to in a previous post in this thread by yours truly ¬¬ A guy who makes kickstarter-funded games (indie games if you don't mind), who does not make demos anymore because he cannot make ends meet, then goes and wants to convince his competitors of not making demos. **Hilarious.**

And yes, people intellectually dishonest can (only apparently) prove anything with statistics. Just present a body of data in the way that supports your point, and omit everything else related to the phenomenon :-P

Then, that was all the "tons of factual evidence"? *yawns*

Unimpressed.

Funny that someone who borrows for his nick the name of such a great game as Fallout forgets the nice demo that this great name enjoyed. It showed that there were going to be many different ways of doing things. That the world was going to dark, post-apocalyptic, Mad-Max-esque and whatnot. Certainly, possibilities for more and deeper fun appeared open, not closed.

A more recent example: Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun. A game in the vein of Commandos, but 3D? Nonsense! Isometric perspective is all it takes! 3D willl be hideous, confusing, utterly unnecessary and probably nausea-inducing! Only that... the demo proved that, against expectations and prejudice, A Commandos-like game could be made in 3D that felt natural and that added to the game, with likeable characters and interesting scenarios.

A good demo shows why this game is worth your money and time more than others, and how it could be different. A demo whets the appetite for more... unless there is nothing to whet the appetite for....

Then, if you are going to make shallow games based on a single premise whose possibilities are going to be exhausted in about 45 minutes, then you better grab some money for those 45 minutes, and do not even think of making no damned demos! (and try to convince people who make better games of not making demos themselves) ^_^

Personally, I don't see why not liking something in a digital format is any different than not liking a physical purchase you buy at a store and can return with generally no hassle. And "liking it" is part of our "responsibility" as consumers; it's not like products have some universal standard and it's OUR fault if we don't like them. And the phrase "vote with your wallet" gets tossed around on this site a lot, but how can you do that when the developer gets your money regardless?

physical vs digital difference:
physical - if you return it you no longer have it
digital - if you make a copy of it you can return it _AND_ still have it.

That's where a lot of the issue comes into the mix. if you return a physical tshirt then you can no longer wear the tshirt. if you could copy the tshirt and return the original then you'd both get your money back and be able to continue wearing the tshirt.

imo there should be a fair refund policy that allows some lenience, but the buyer should also do a little due diligence too to make sure they're not buying something they're going to not like enough to ask for a refund.

Yeah, what you're doing there is attack the person rather than their arguments and you do so obviously without knowing much about the person (Schell happens to be one of the most important academics in the field and he's the last person to knowingly misguide developers).

There's also actually one thing I was wrong about (first saw this video years ago, did not rewatch it now, misremembered it): Schell did not conduct the research himself but cited the findings of an analytics firm, so your attacks are both misplaced and logically flawed.

Are you kidding me? :D You're so offended by objective findings that you dismiss them because they don't support your idea of how things work (which is the intuitively obvious solution and one of the reasons why almost all games used to have demos in the first place but has since been debunked by exactly that kind of research). Talk about intellectually dishonest.

Well, as I said, publishers have their own data. I first learned about this straight from the horse's mouth, a product manager of a AAA studio who cited their internal research on this matter (and stated that he knows that other companies arrived at that same conclusion), alas, that data is not publicly available. I know, I know, thus it's just hearsay from your perspective, but to me it's what constitutes the vast body of evidence because I know that guy, his integrity and methods and how important it is to him (and other people like him) to get these things right.

As I explained: that's simply not how it works and where reality is counter-intuitive and it involves psychological phenomena which are known (and some of which Schell actually explains elsewhere, just not in the video - don't have the time to search for that right now). One of the main motivators for people to play a game is the urge to try the game at all - demos allow to satisfy this particular need without paying and that's one of the reasons they don't generally lead to people buying games. When you're done with the demo you arrive at a choice: pay to play more of the game you've already played through the demo or check out another game that you haven't played yet at all. Consensus is that the latter is generally simply the more attractive option, even if there's a paywall. Never underestimate people's drive for instant gratification. And the evidence here is among others the aforementioned success of the F2P format which abuses the desire for instant gratification to the fullest.

And you really must take into account how the market has shifted. You're lolling at the fact that Schell's talk is old but mostly refer to demos of 90s games yourself. And with Shadow Tactics, sure, it may be a very good example of a game where a demo made sense (the existence of which I acknowledged in my previous post) because the Commandos-style gameplay was all but extinct by the time the game arrived and its appeal is hard to convey to a new generation of gamers who don't know this convention yet or why it's so immensely satisfying. In case of a game like this a demo may indeed prove effective because after the demo you're indeed unable to go to an even remotely similar title that's not twenty years old and clearly inferior to Shadow Tactics in a whole number of ways (graphics, interface, story etc.). Of course after the success of Shadow Tactics numerous games in this style are being made now (Desperados 3 by the same developers, a new Commandos by a new studio and tons of indie projects) and that's very likely to negatively affect the effectiveness of demos for this kind of game (not that I know how the demo for Shadow Tactics affected its sales - but it's known that the game was a massive success).

No, man. What I did is showing how this guy is anything but a neutral "academic". In fact, he is anything but neutral about the issue, and it is in this light that his arguments should be examined.

...And I stopped reading here, so, no need for more answer. This is the second time that you personalize while using poor (and tired) arguments. Enough ¬¬

I agree with this sentiment......perhaps store credit should be allowed at best for such types of refund requests, and if someone keeps asking for them then the store could choose to turn them down if they kept doing so? That seems fair, right?

Or they can keep their current policy and have a lot less of a headache to deal with without having to play store credit whack-a-mole so much. People had abused refund policies long before GOG and Steam were thought of. It sucks that refund policies are so strict but here we are.

Well, for what it's worth: I'd actually gladly hear you out if you any specifics about his alleged malicious behaviour. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯