Demos occupy a weird space in today's world, I think the closest equivalent are film trailers. You wouldn't expect to get one episode of a series as a teaser or just 20 minutes of a film! Though they seem to work when it comes to gaming. In theory demos should give the player an opportunity to try out a title and get to see if they like it or not. Instead of just judging by the cover (lots still do) or by reviews.
Reviews can be great but they hard to do well. One person's gaming hook is another's chore. It's very difficult to judge the games in a wider context, it’s best to try to set them against similar games from before and the reaction they got. Streamers on Twitch can be a useful way to see how it plays but this leaves a lot of room for spoilers! Obviously, the best way is to just play it yourself but that's not possible for every single title, especially as most games are not cheap.
Demos are not something I have really played at all in the last decade, usually I read enough about a game that I know if I want it or not. This amounts to 3 or 4 reviews and a bunch of YouTube footage to snare me in. Recently I have gone back to them, particularly for genres I never play.
JRPG's (Japanese Role Playing Game) are a hugely loved genre that are still probably a bit niche in this country. They are huge deep games with a distinctive art style that are usually turn based that take a long time to get into and then complete. Final Fantasy probably being the best known series. It could be argued that this kind of thing is not really appropriate for demos but how else will you really know if it's for you? Gutted there is not a Xenoblade 2 demo to play as it's a game I have been toying with for a while. £40 is a lot to spend on something that may not work out.
Looking online Steam has over 1500 demos on offer which is actually not as many as I was expecting though there is a great deal of variety. Obviously, Xbox and PlayStation offer their own but who really wants to play a demo of the latest COD!? You should know what you are getting, the big games rarely get tweaked much to make sure they give the fans what they want. It leads me to the question of whether demos are still a thing??
At Their Best
Several of my friends have been very excited by the remake of Resident Evil 2 that will have come out at the time of me posting this. I've seen the movies and played a couple of the games but it's not really my kind of game. I was not even going to give it any attention until they announced a demo with a neat selling point. It's set in the police station and you could try to escape within a 30 minute time limit.
So far so standard but, brilliantly, they said you have one chance. That's it. Play it and then it's gone. As the game is a remake this was a stroke of genius. Players will know what to expect as it's a re release but they will want to see just how its change. Giving them a one off challenge is a neat way of making it competitive. It payed off as it had 2.3 million downloads! Playing it now it's currently on pause with 12:25 left on the clock. Fuck me it's tense. The countdown timer actually really works as I usually am very cautious in games but this is pushing me to get through it as quick as I can so I can see it all. Or at least try to.
I have died the once to which the game offers to reduce the difficulty to make it a bit easier. A quick no and you are back at the last save point. It’s actually really good, very atmospheric and pretty fucking scary. Numerous times I was caught out but what I thought was a dead zombie only to have it grab my leg as I try to sneak further down the corridor.
Bastards.
There are a lot of secrets to work out which will give replayability in the full game. Overall, very impressive. Oh, and it has a really cool live action trailer. Capcom seem to have gone all out on this. The best demo I have played researching this is one on the Switch eShop, Octopath Traveler - Prologue Demo.
A JRPG from Square Enix, you have eight different protagonists to go out and explore the world. It has 90s inspired pixel art style and turn based combat. You select your main character and then select a couple of others for your party. The fantastic thing is that the demo gives you three hours of gameplay, allowing you to select any of the eight people to play as for this time.
Once your time is up you can purchase the full game and bring your save over to carry on! This surely is the perfect demo and it makes it all the more tempting to pick up a copy. You can start again in the demo with another character and have another save file (though it being a 60 hour game it might be wise to stick to one save to start with). Football Manager is another title that with a full fat demo, allowing you to play 6 months in game and then again carry the save over. Great way to get into it prior to release or more likely your next payday. There are a lot of good demos out there to try, you can see the thought and effort put into them. Much to applaud.
Demos For All
Now I know I am trying to argue for something that is not possible but I think every single game should come with a demo. 80% of video games sales in the UK last year were digital and as that is the case the ease of getting a demo online is now pretty much available to everyone. Distribution is no longer a problem.
So, what is? The type of game will play some part. Not all genres easily fit this model, online only games would be hard to design for. Do you just include one map and a couple of characters? Do they get to play people in the full game or just demo only players? Huge open world games offer another problem. Do you just cut up an area of the map with invisible walls and include a couple of short missions? The fun part of those games is going out to explore and see the whole map so you won't be able to feel that this way.
Sports games are fine as you just include a few teams and a couple of modes. Episodic games can easily just offer the first one as a demo, the game is nicely broken up already. Companies tend to hire clever people so it's not beyond them to be able to fit a unique demo to all kinds of games. So, to find out whether they work I tried out a load of different titles.
One strange one was for Katamari Damacy Reroll, a game I have never played before. The premise being you need to make a giant sphere of junk by rolling a ball around to stick to items to it in random environments. This is a remake of a very popular PS2 game, the demo being the intro story and then one 4 minute level. That’s pretty bad in my book, it must mean the game is not very long. You get a feel for it but not for how the scale vastly increases level on level as you ball grows and grows.
It's the lightest of tastes and would have been better with a second level. Another poor one was Kirby Star Allies which had two levels, easy and 'hard'. Both were piss easy and it wasn’t very enjoyable. The mechanics are a little convoluted and not explained well enough in these rushed exeperiences. Both were very short but did have a boss fight at the end. On the plus side, visually its great and the remix of the original music is stunning. Very tempting but the lack of difficulty will put you off though they say the updates and additions post launch have made a much better game.
The best one of this bunch is the tough Mega Man 11, which gave you a full area to beat and boss to fight. Being so difficult it took multiple playthroughs to complete which is pretty cool. The premise is that all games should have a demo but there is a question of whether sequels need one. Usually most major series have multiple titles and it takes so long for the next one to come out the original will have crashed in price. £15 is a doable amount for most people to pick up the odd game so it’s probably not worth companies doing one for big well known games.
Look at Just Cause 4. From the reviews it seems that apart from the weather affects it’s basically the same as the third one. You know what you are getting so I don't need to try it out. I got JC3 for £3 and it was a fun but flawed game. So maybe not all but certainly games that are unique or at least not the same old mainstream ones.
How Demos Were
So, way back in olden times, before smartphones existed and prior to the internet permeating every single home there were few ways to get technology information. Speaking to friends or colleagues was useful but they still had to find the information somewhere. There were eye wateringly expensive phone lines you could call for the latest news or gaming cheats. Teletext was still a thing (look it up kids!) but that was catering to News, Weather and booking holidays.
The only option? Video Game Magazines. Nowadays it’s basically a dead media but over the course of 3 decades this was huge, with countless specialised ones. Nintendo fan? Got you covered with Nintendo Power. Prefer computers? Have PC Gamer and PC Zone! The big change in the 90's was the move to disk based games over cartridges. There were smaller, cheaper and easier to produce. This meant you could easily attach them to the front of a magazine. The original PlayStation really took to this and I have some great memories of disks I obtained. It was my only experience of Crash Bandicoot until last year, letting you smash through a whole level!
Having such vastly different games on one disk meant you tried a bit of everything. I think PC magazines had the best for variety though for lowly computers would mean half the demos were unplayable. Definitely missed out on a bunch of titles there. Or you could be sneaky as one friend was who managed to nab a couple of extra demo disks from other magazines and stick them onto the one magazine… so hard to choose!
At this point in time there were no smartphones and such basic Internet that getting games legally was tough. The whole Freemium or Free To Play titles were such a long time in the future that probably marks most kid’s forays into the gaming world now. For those of a certain generation playing and collecting demo disks was a huge part of your gaming experience. It's weird getting older and see how forms of consumerism go extinct but it makes sense. Progress and all that.
It's amazing seeing a kid watch the same film 100 times, no wonder we could replay the same one level over and over. Partly it’s due to not having anything else but if you enjoy it so much you want to do it as much as you can and try to discover all its secrets. It sounds sad but going to buy the latest magazine with a demo was just as exciting as going to buy a new game.
A full title purchase was so rare due to price so having something accessible was the next best thing. Maybe this sounds as crazy as our grandparents telling us about listening to the wireless! It's great we have moved on but it's worth remembering where we have come from. For all of this demos are still getting made and didn't almost die out like magazines.
The Morality Argument
Demos are pretty much all free so they can reach a bigger audience to try a game, especially when digital. The idea being the more people that play, the more people will buy it. I have no numbers for sales so can’t say definitively if they are affected against games that don't have them. From the company's point of view cost is an issue and obviously lots of companies and indie devs will struggle to make the base game, let alone a free demo on top of that.
After including the wage, equipment, pension and other various costs it's about £7500 per month for each employee at all the big firms. This is huge if it takes you a couple of months to work on an additional piece of software that won't bring in any direct money. I would be surprised if none of the big developers had not done some research into this but there is scant information online. Just on this basis we should not expect demos for games, it's a huge financial gamble.
Another reason they shouldn't bother with demos is that they could and probably do hurt sales. When making a purchase you are putting your faith in the product and the company. People often go in blind to a game, taking a punt hoping that it will be brilliant. Or if not then something they like for all its flaws. But if its crap then you feel you have wasted your money and been cheated.
But with a demo you’ve made no purchase so it's basically risk free. Though if you don't like the game you probably won't purchase the full title. I am rather torn on this as I don't want companies to rip off gamers, if you have little money you want to make sure you are spending it wisely on something you love. But companies need funding to keep going and ultimately make another game.
My instinct is that you should give people all the information you possibly can to let them make a choice, preferably with a free weekend on the game. On the other hand, there is a great risk. What if the demo is nothing like the finished product? What if it's been buffed up to look and run better, including features that won't make it into the final game?
It's a tough one as there could be intentions to bring as much to a title as possible but they fall short due to over ambition or time constraints. Countless games have had issues and changes of directions leaving a very different product. Still you could be fooled into buying something that you won’t actually like as it's changed so much. There is no right answer for this but it’s worth thinking about before pre ordering something. Everyone remembers No Man's Sky but to be fair to that they have done huge updates to transform the game so are slowly making amends.
The Future
So that's just a flavour of demos from way back and a few from now. What about going forward? There are a tonne of Betas that are put out to test the online capabilities of upcoming titles are basically demos. A way to let devs fine tune a game while also giving you a huge chance to properly dive into the game. It used to be the only way to be involved was to pre-order the game but thankfully they are now making them accessible to everyone, which in theory should make a better game and do more sales.
So why not extend this to more games, even those without online features. You can really fine tune the game play and avoid a major backlash on release. Studio reputation matters, Fallout 76 has caused a lot of damage to Bethesda and it seems Fallout in general is in a nose dive over the last couple of releases. Steam are constantly having free weekends of games which you can then buy at a reduced price, they are well worth checking out.
Sure, they may not be the latest titles but are usually something relatively recent. One other equivalent I want to mention again is that Early Access titles are basically paid for demos. Especially at the very beginning when they should be at their cheapest but have the least amount of content. You get to explore a small area or limited number of levels with some but not all the games mechanics.
By jumping in early you do run some risks but seeing a game growing up knowing you can play it anytime is amazing. Though I get most people won't care about them. If you barely buy one game a month and it's usually the biggest title out it won't matter to you. I mentioned I was writing about demos to several friends this past week and two of them were surprised they were still even a thing!
They are and I hope I have shown that they are still relevant. I don't believe they will go away anytime soon, they are deeply embedded within gaming culture and are still useful. Whether they can come up with new ideas remains to be seen. Prequel levels would be amazing or like in Pokémon Alpha / Omega on the 3DS gave you a whole separate area to explore not included in the main game. It gave people a taste and allowed them to get a special one off Greninja that they could use in their team.
At the end of the day the demos must be all about the player and from history this is not always the case but you should be able to take something away from playing one. I will be interested to see how they evolve. So, what are your best memories of demos?
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