You cannot.

I think also internet and social media on the whole has maybe diminished the need for demos. Reading other people discuss about a game, and maybe seeing some user-made gameplay Youtube-videos of it, seem to give already a pretty good idea whether I'd like it or not (but not fully of course, you never know for sure until you try it yourself, and even then your opinion may change for better or worse the longer you play the game).

For PC gamers the added benefit is to see how well the game runs on your system specifically, but I mostly buy games with the mindset of "If I don't or can't play it right now, I'll play it later.". Goes also to Witcher 3, I pre-ordered it even though I am not convinced it will run satisfactorily on my current system.

The demos would nowadays normally be quite huge anyway I think, so it is more practical to do it like Steam or Origin does, limited time playing of the full game. But that practice needs DRM. I personally usually pass those "free weekend" deals though (downloading gigabytes over gigabytes, just to try out a game shortly), unless I am very interested to try some game out.


I don't quite agree with that Extra Credit's view that e.g. free-to-play games are great because you can try the game for free, and only pay as you go. It does work as a free demo, but unfortunately that whole concept relies on making the gaming inconvenient if you try to continue playing without paying, and it reduces the game mechanisms to e.g. forcing the free players to wait for mundane things, and/or add a heavy element of luck to the game so that you have to retry to pass a level million times even if you're supposed to be skilled with the game (all those Candy Crush Saga etc. games).

TeamFortress 2 appears to be one exception, but then the problem for the publisher is that since there is no real gameplay incentive to pay for anything, we don't, even if we keep playing the game. Maybe there are enough people who want funny hats or some more advanced gadgets as soon as possible.

The episodic system where first few levels are free and rest costs money is quite ok idea too, after all that is what classic shareware games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom used.

No, you're seeing it from the wrong perspective, he's doing the devil's advocate.

The point was since people wouldn't buy the games based on the demos experience therefore developers/publishers prefer to not release the demos, i would say that most games are mediocre and not shitty, people would have that reaction of "I'll wait for a sale" instead of buying (blindly) day one, in second place would be the shitty games not selling because people saw the game was shitty through the demo.

In the end. he's right, the study shows that games with demos will lead to less sales, it's bad for us gamers having to buy a game without playing it first but hey, they're (the devs/pubs) in for the money and not for us (i still laugh at those who trust in "#4theplayers", yeah right....).

way to necro..

The video makes it perfectly clear why the developers/publishers prefer to not release the demos. But the first thing that is said in the video is: "The truth is that it's a direct result of consumer habits." and then we are presented with 9 situations, where only 2 situations lead to increased sales. The problem I had with the video is that the situations where the demo of the game would lead to decreased sales were all caused by bad demos of bad/boring games.

So demos haven't disappeared because of "consumer habits", but because of bad demos of bad/boring games.

I have a friend who mostly plays Team Fortress 2, and if he's to be believed, the game is entirely about hats and such.

It gave me some super rare crate on maybe day #4. Selling it immediately would have netted me like $75 in Steam credit. One could think of it as a valuable gift from Valve to me, but on the other hand it didn't cost them anything and someone would have paid them the $75 just to buy it off me.

I just gave it to my friend in return for some in-game things since he wanted it real bad.

That's not the conclusion i came to when i watched the video. What i got from the video is that making a demo is not financially rewarding. If the game is great, a demo won't do much to increase revenue and if the game sucks, the demo will probably make things worse.

You're reading "consumer habits" as a bad connotation when he's trying to say that our consumer habits (bad/mediocre demos = no sale) leads to a decrease in games sales, like i said, he's doing the devil's advocate, he's saying that pubs/devs don't release demos because we, as consumers, are doing the right thing but in the process showing them that bad/mediocre demos/games will lead to less revenue.

I've never found demos that much useful. Not even when they game on a bootable floppy disk on a gaming magazine...

The reason is that I found them often misleading. Some devs would put out demos early. Then the demo would have performance problems, bugs etc letting me think there was a sloppy done product, while in reality the final version was a lot more polished and ran fine on my machine.
Or the other way around: The demo is the most polished and interesting level of the whole game, the rest if the full product isn't really that good. Like with movie trailers that look very promising, but in reality you have already seen the best scenes and the rest of the movie is boring.

Sometimes Piratebay and other similar torrent site (e.g. KAT) act like a free ad for the developers. Pirates download those releases and some of them will buy those games if they like. Don't you agree?

nice crystal ball you have there ;)

I don't need crystal balls to see the facts. Using pirated games as a "demo" is just a lame excuse and nothing else. People who want free stuff will just make up excuses like that to make themselves look good. It just doesn't justify it, especially at this day and age when it's never been so easy to find tons of information before purchasing a game. Not to mention that games have never been so cheap as they are today with all these sales.

That was never what I meant to say. I was just stressing that the logic used in the video was faulty, and I still claim that it is.
I don't see it as they were trying to play "devil's advocate", I see it as just an inflammatory statement.

The more I'm trying to explain this the more I'm regretting using the word "retarded " in my initial post.
That is exactly the same conclusion I reached after watching the video. And that has nothing to do with "consumer habits" which is the only part I was commenting on.