The growth of online distribution channels has greatly improved the ability for publishers and developers to do ‘try before you buy’. There’s certainly been a growth of betas and demos this generation, when you had to get your content onto a magazine’s cover disk only the AAA games really got public demos. However with XBLA mandating that every title on there gets a demo, and with a much, much higher proportion of games getting demos.
The question is do demos really effect a game’s sales? For some games, games which have ‘issues’, it may be better if the faults stay hidden and are not exposed to the public in a demo. Even if a game doesn’t have technical issues on one of the platforms, demos often put people off who would have purchased the game anyway.
This isn’t necessarily because a game is bad, but more because the game wasn’t quite what people were expecting it to be. Finally people often forget that demos aren’t the final build of a game, if the demo has things that the public doesn’t like they often aren’t in the release version of the game anyway. There’s no way round this really, even if developers were to put a notice on the demo build no-one would pay it much attention.
Whilst beta may be bad for developers in changing peoples’ perception of a game and lowering it sales, they’re obviously good for us. I don’t want to buy a terrible game because I heard it might be good, and I want to be able to find those hidden gems that I would have easily overlooked otherwise.
Recently I’ve been playing a lot of the Just Cause 2 demo, which is simply fantastic. Whilst all the trailers for the game look amazing, I wouldn’t necessarily have purchased it based solely on them. Now that I’ve played the demo I want the game a lot more. Even if it only had the parachuting I’d probably still consider it, the physics and controls for the parachute are perfect and the way the scenery is laid out below you is beautiful.
So how is the situation for you? Are demos a good thing, helping your make up your mind? Or do they often misrepresent a game, generating a negative perception of it?