It was mainly on the PS3, but the original release of the game was so buggy that is was basically unplayable. It took them forever to patch it and they have had issues with each of the add-ons being crazy buggy. They even said that the issues with Dawnguard add-on is basically "unsolvable."

Well said, and the odd chance you may find an unexpected game based off the demo.

I miss demos, helped me decide if I wanted to buy a game or not. After just playing the XCom demo, I am most definitely getting that game. Was fun!

Yes I miss them.

It is one of the reasons I like the 360 the most this console generation. Having a demo of every XBLA game, plus a good portion of the retail games is nice. Its a good way to find games you like, and if you just want a quick fix of a game, a way to get that without buying the full thing.

I know, I had that issue with Spec Ops for some reason. Ran like shit on demo, runs perfectly on my modest XFX AMD Radeon 6950 2Gig and AMD Fx-4100 3.6 quad.

Games are too cheap these days to bother with demos. If I'm playing a demo, I'm asking myself why I'm not working through my backlog. Time is precious(ish).

I'm guessing they do that to trick people with not so powerful PCs into buying their game. Then after you purchased the game, SURPRISE!!! 10 FPS to 15 FPS.

Hmm, could you name some examples?

In my experience, demos are usually much _less_ optimized than the game itself - because the game keeps being patched, whereas the demo usually isn't.

Civ4 had serious compatibility problems with ATI cards, and a totally non-optimized graphics engine (which kept filling the video memory with duplicates of already existing data) on release. The demo still has these problems. The game itself got fixed with a patch. I remember that we kept telling the people who had problems getting the demo to run, that the actual game didn't have these problems anymore, and was in fact quite stable and solid.

The only example I can remember right now is Warhammer Space Marine.

Quoted for truth. And I think that's the reason in a nutshell - too many affordable games.

In yesteryear 75% off sales weren't necessarily 6 months away. Games came out at $50 or so, and they stayed that way. Buying them was a huge investment, relatively speaking, compared to game purchases in the present.

Well everyone has a different definition of "affordable".

Yea, sorry, what I mean is relative to 10 or 15 years ago. There are just so many more games out there now, which means more sales and discounts to entice consumers. For people who make a lot of game purchases, they seem to sometimes do so on impulse without concern of whether they'll like a game or not since a 75% off deal seems too good to pass up.

Yep. Also - there's an (individually different) price point at which people will simply take the gamble of buying a game they can't test before, because the game is so cheap that a loss seems inconsequential.

If a game costs about as much as a bar of chocolate, and less than a bus ticket, then I often buy it even if I mostly expect to _not_ like it. Because it still _might_ surprise me, and if not, there's no damage done.

I saw a film at the cinema last week. I could buy 2-3 games from GOG for the same price as that ticket. Most games offer tens of hours of entertainment, compared to 2 hours for an average film. For those concerned about how their entertainment money is spent, games present a considerably smaller risk than films. It wasn't always this way of course. Go back, like you said, 10-15 years and it was a completely different market.