Crytek Thinks Free Game Demos Will Soon Be Extinct 379
An anonymous reader writes with this quote from Develop:
"The CEO of indie studio Crytek has defended EA's divisive 'premium downloadable content' strategy, while also predicting the extinction of free game demos. ... Crytek's co-founder Cevat Yerli said he wasn't sure that a demo of Crysis 2 was going to be released. He said: 'A free demo is a luxury we have in the game industry that we don't have in other industries such as film. Because we've had this free luxury for so long, now there are plans to change this people are complaining about it. The reality is that we might not see any free game demos in the long term. ... Yes it is quite unpopular, but this is a messaging issue. The problem with any new strategy like this is it initially may appear as a blood-hungry, money-grabbing strategy. But I think there is a genuine interest here to give gamers something more than a small demo released for free. Really, what this is, is an attempt to salvage a problem. The industry is still losing a lot of money to piracy as the market becomes more online-based. So it’s encouraging to see strategies outlined to combat this.'"
really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. With a trailer you get to watch a bit of the movie, with a demo you get to play a bit of the game. By comparison, game trailers are sort of like a movie trailer where you only get to hear the audio. Demoes aren't a luxury, they're a courtesy.
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Re:really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:really? (Score:5, Funny)
As long as RAZ0R1911 has anything to say about it, we'll still have game demos.
Re:really? (Score:5, Funny)
I wasn't trying to be funny. I buy every game I play beyond the first level, but I download a "demo" before I buy.
Re:really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you need a demo for every game? Of course not but that's a choice of what advertising to invest in. No different than deciding if you want a billboard with your game on it by the side of the highway or on the side of a bus or an ad on TV. The type of advertising also differs on the name your selling. If you have something completely new, I'll need more convincing to buy it than a name I'm familiar with like the God of War series. Frankly they could have had a 10 second commercial with a guy saying, "God of War III is ready, come buy it." and that would have been good enough for me.
QQ (Score:3, Insightful)
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Of course, the wine tasting example is the only one where there is a cost associated with letting someone have some.
Cars can be test driven by many others or sold, houses can have multiple walk-throughs for essentially no extra cost (you can show 10 folks for the same price as showing 1 folk), making a downloadable copy of a game (ie putting it on a server) has no real extra cost (you'd be serving up website, updates, extra maps, etc anyway).
Opening bottles of (good) wine, good scotch, etc. has a cost. Can
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Maybe, but with good scotch or wine, one is fairly assured of a reasonably enjoyable experience.
With the kind of crap some of these developers sneeze out it might just piss people off and generate a lot of bad PR. It might generate a little revenue, too, since you buy the demo *and* the full game.
Now if they offered a discount on the full game if one purchases the demo, that might be easier to swallow.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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I just paid 20 bux for World of Goo. They gave away the experimental version and have a demo version. It runs on about anything as it's Linux/Mac friendly. There is a native version for Linux, Mac and Windows. The Windows version even runs under wine fairly well.
Re:really? (Score:5, Interesting)
2D Boy [2dboy.com]is a shining example of how to produce a solid game, and then distribute it like reasonable human beings. The demo was extensive, not time limited, and fully 1/4 of the game. The purchase price was reasonable, and was available for all platforms, with no DRM.
I've rarely been as impressed as I was when I found the World of Goo. I bought 4 copies for myself, my family, and friends.
Re:really? (Score:5, Interesting)
No - there is a difference in it that I think most people would agree on. With a trailer, you are trying to build hype for the movie. Get its name out there and make it desirable to watch.
A demo, on the other hand, tend to works the opposite way for gamers. I grab a demo which means I'm already interested in seeing what the game is like. I use the demo to determine whether or not I want to purchase it.
I can't remember the last time I went out of my way to look up a movie trailer to see if I wanted to see the movie. It HAS happened, but not nearly on the same scale.
Re:really? (Score:5, Insightful)
A few years ago, I don't remember what movie it was, but about five minutes from the movie was released onto the Internet as a promotion. I thought about how innovative this was, and wished other movies would do this too. This functions as a "demo" of a movie more than a preview does. I think it's comparable and good.
Crytek is acting like interactivity isn't a major factor in games. I can't truly evaluate a game without playing it for a little while. In particular this is a big deal because, unlike other things, I can't seem to return a game because it sucked.
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The opening scene of Super Troopers was available on the internet. Is that what you were thinking of?
Interestingly, I saw the first scene with my cousin and I didn't find it very funny. Several years later I saw the whole movie and I loved it. So this strategy can backfire, too.
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The releasing the first X minutes of a movie has become a more and more common tactic in movie promotions recently. I know it's happened for more than a few movies, but the only one I remember specifically was Borat.
Otherwise, I totally agree with you. It's hard to put down $50-60 for a game basically sight unseen. Especially when so many developers do release demos, and XBox Live requires them, etc. Not only does a demo tell you if you would like the game, a demo will also give you an idea how well a g
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Serenity? It was 10 minutes IIRC.
It was also a bit dishonest, because those first 10 minutes were the most engaging parts of the film. So it, too, was released to build hype. But I loved Serenity regardless.
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I can't remember the last time I went out of my way to look up a movie trailer to see if I wanted to see the movie. It HAS happened, but not nearly on the same scale.
I do this all the time. The trailer often picks some of the most interesting sequences of the movie. If it isn't good enough, the movie is binned to rental or exclusion.
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What sucks is when the 30 seconds or 2 minutes (or whatever the length of the long ones in theaters) of the movie shown is either from an awesome deleted scene or is made up of the only 30 second (to 2 minutes or whatever) of the movie worth watching.
Re:really? (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe the big difference between game demos and movies is that games are both longer than movies and much more expensive for the consumer. If you lost $8 on a movie on a Friday night, it might not be as big of a deal as losing $60+ on a game. Even if the movie sucked, you could still have a decent time overall (making the movie a small part of a larger evening). It's a relatively quick experience. Many people buy games hoping they'll provide much more than 2 hours worth of entertainment. If the game is terrible, paying that larger price seems like even more of a loss.
Sometimes I'll see a movie if the trailer is bad. I'll almost never buy a game if I didn't enjoy the demo. The more expensive the entertainment, the more critical people are about it and the more stingy they are with their money, at least in my experience.
-Chris
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Re:really? (Score:4, Interesting)
If there's no demo, to me that means the game is so bad that no one would buy it if they played it first.
I also use the demos to decide what I want to play.
FarCry was great. I have 2 copies that I paid top dollar for based on playing it first; I got a 64bit demo. :)
FarCry2 was good enough to make me keep playing it as different people.
Ubisoft really made me happy the games I have of theirs don't include and of the BS that has kept people from playing a single player game. I can't believe anyone would buy a game like that.
Thank you /. for saving me the money I would have spent preordering Crysis 2; two copies were in the group of things I was going to buy when I got home tonight. Our work network doesn't like online buying, lol.
This article saved me almost $100, that's pretty good for slashdot. :)
When someone "shines a light on it" by saying " it initially may appear as a blood-hungry, money-grabbing strategy", that's exactly what they're doing.
Unfortunately, PC gamers aren't as stupid as "they" need us to be. I'll wait until a demo is out, or someone else I know that is stupid enough to buy it blind does, and I play theirs.
I still play Q2:Ground Zero (1 give all per death!) on my lan when we get bored with Crysis Wars or UT3; if they release something I think is a shit product, I won't buy it. Plays great on my HD4780. :)
I still have tons of games to play without their latest 'incremental update'.
I'll wait a year and see if it's worth buying at $20.
Re:really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, given Steam it's pretty easy to get demos almost "pushed" onto you, with their ads and everything. And it has actually happened more than just once that I downloaded the demo for a game that fits into my prefered genre to give it a look, then buy it.
Of course it can work in the other direction, too. If there hadn't been a demo for Supreme Commander 2, I might have bought it. But with the demo I could already easily determine that the game is as shallow as a puddle (and the reviews support that first impression), so I didn't buy.
In a nutshell, though, if you (dear studio bosses) are afraid of launching demos of your game, the message that reaches me is that I would not want to buy your game after playing the demo. Either it's just completely unoriginal (SC2, e.g.) or not going to keep me interested for longer than whatever play time the demo offers.
No demo, no sale. Easy as that. At the very least I will wait until Metacritic and similar pages fill with user reviews. The comparison with movies holds no ounce of water. First of all, I do get movie trailers that at least tell me what I could expect from the movie. And second, I don't spend 60+ bucks on a movie.
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A great example was R.U.S.E. - interesting game concept, decent single player AI, and ok multiplayer. But overall, it wasn't worth the money for me. Did the developer loose a sale because they relea
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No - there is a difference in it that I think most people would agree on. With a trailer, you are trying to build hype for the movie. Get its name out there and make it desirable to watch.
...I grab a demo which means I'm already interested in seeing what the game is like. I use the demo to determine whether or not I want to purchase it.
The difference is that it's harder to juice up a demo than a movie trailer. You can just throw all the good bits into the trailer (funny lines, robots fighting, whatever) and make a good trailer out of all but the crappiest of movies, but not so for game demos. The game demo highlights the mechanics of the game, which you don't usually change between the demo and the final version. I mean, if I play the Call of Duty 7 demo, that's basically how the game is going to play out. There might be one or two me
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I can't think how many times I've i've been excited by a game or film trailer only to be disappointed enough with the end result to not buy it. Which leaves me wondering do we even need the commercial release? Crytek should just release cool looking game trailers.
Scratch
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Didn't DNF do that?
Demo is best way to see how it runs (Score:3, Interesting)
thats if i wanted it... Farcry 2 is a brilliant example... the first game was very fun... the second was so repetitive, i hated it...
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Indeed it is a "luxury" that largely doesn't help big labels like EA because they can go off of brand-name and star-power to sell their games, actually showing off game-play before someone buys the game means that the consumer might be forewarned on crap-ware titles. Smaller game companies with less reputation and ability to hire big names of course will still need demos.
Of course that doesn't say anything about there being smaller companies. EA and their ilk can make sure of that as a separate matter.
This will insure.. (Score:5, Insightful)
So now you won't find out our game is crap till you buy it! :p
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So now you won't find out our game is crap till you download it from bit torrent
There, fixed that for you.
Hoist the jolly roger and start the rum songs, it's pirating time.
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No no, now I will find out your game is crap after somebody else has bought it.
Re:This will insure.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Basically exactly that.
What changes for me? Well, first of all I will not hear about that game, probably. I'm a demo junkie. I download them all. If Steam offers a demo, I have it. If the game's good, I buy it. I can't actually remember when I bought the last game without a trial (that wasn't already in the bargain bin and a friend tipped me off).
If I'm not 100% impressed by the demo (it happens), I wait for some user comments to show up on Metacritic. Of course it does happen that a demo shows me a game that I almost MUST have, then I'll even preorder. But I never preordered a game without a trial. And I certainly never will. No, not even a sequel to a game that I loved. Perimeter, Supreme Commander and countless others have shown me that sequels are by no means an insurance against crap.
So what will happen when they refuse me the demo? First of all, I will not preorder anything anymore. Second, I will not buy at release. I will turn to Metacritic and wait for a sensible amount of reviews. No matter how good the game sounds, countless times it's been shown that even a studio whose other products were stellar produce a lemon now and then. By then the game will probably also have dropped a bit in price.
So, I'd guess no demos means less money from me. Dunno how many will see that the same way, but I'd guess a lot of people here do pretty much the same.
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According to Associated Press style, to "ensure" that something happens is to make certain that it does, and to "insure" is to issue an insurance policy. Other authorities, however, consider "ensure" and "insure" interchangeable. To please conservatives, make the distinction. However, it is worth noting that in older usage these spellings were not clearly distinguished.
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/assure.html [wsu.edu]
Let them get rid of free demos (Score:5, Insightful)
I love it!
As an indie game developer, I love the fact that I can be agile while the other guys are big & dumb. I can take risks on my titles. Kill off your free game demos. It just gives me one more tool to be profitable.
While you are at it, why don't you do any of these creative things. You can have this list for free
a. Require micropayments to save single player games
b. Require micropayments to save high scores
c. Never release free content for your games
d. Never give your community modding tools
e. Lock down your artwork and other IP, so 3rd parties cannot make fan sites.
It will make my job that much easier if you do.
Re:Let them get rid of free demos (Score:5, Funny)
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I'd keep an eye on EA/BioWare, though. They're managing to be somewhat evil (neutering resale by offering "free" one-time DLC) while maintaining light DRM, a strong mod community, and damn good games.
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I wish I had mod points. I also wish you'd posted this as non-AC.
Mod parent +insightful! Go indie games! :)
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This is why you plan for it, and work around that possibility.
"Joe Developer's GAME OF AWESOME" sells well. EA buys out JD's company and rights to the game... he makes a new one, and markets "Joe Developer's SUPER SWEET SIDESCROLLER" (or something). People will realize it's not EA's game, and will recognize that it's from the same creator as something they liked -- witness Peter Molyneux's games, or Sid Meier's. We don't know them by their studio, but by the creator.
I agree (Score:2)
Free Demo's will probably be phased out over time. As big studios go on, they'll make the Beta open to select purchasers of other titles of theirs. See example; Halo:Reach Beta open to ODST buyers. Or Blizzard's Beta entries being determined by how much you play their other successful games.
Its reached a point where consumers can help developers out in beta testing - and that studios can selectively choose who to test it so they know their target audience better. A good symbiotic relationship, if you ask me
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Did you Demo a console before you purchased it?
In store or at a friends house?
You will always have a way to demo a product before you play it. Either existing fans will draw you in, or you'll try it at your local retailer in the demo kiosk they set up.
Demos may stick around as smaller studios see it as a way to draw in new customers. But for big companies like Crytek and EA, who have already released more than one multi-million dollar game seller, they don't need to draw in new customers, that will happen n
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They seem to be happy that game reviews aren't much more than advertisements, that they can effectively sell you a used product as new rather than giving you a seal copy or that we're losing genres and innovation in place of numerous FPS sequels and sports titles.
It's no wonder people are so happy to pirate games. They see no val
A luxury? (Score:2)
I'm sure there are a metric ton of people who will line up for this stupidity, but I won't be one of them. I mean, demos
Re:A luxury? (Score:5, Interesting)
So lets do a hypothetical. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Okay - lets pop another hypothetical.
There are two games. One you know nothing about other then its being developed by the same studio that produced 2 other titles you loved. The other one, you played the demo, and weren't impressed.
Which one are you going to buy?
This is the kind of trend the market is following.
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There are two games. One I know nothing about other then the developer telling me its worth 60$ and one I can actually try a bit of before shelling out the cash. Guess which one I'm going to be buying?
There's the third game - the cracked copy that comes from your favorite illicit data channel. You get a full demo of the entire game before shelling out $60. Of course, you usually trade off time to get that copy. And the copy you then consider for purchase is going to have all kinds of DRM on it.
I can see how "piracy" is really limiting the ability for game publishing houses to put out free demos.
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There are two games, both of them are worthless shit that you wouldn't play if you got paid to do so, and they both cost $60 + $15/month + $5 for each DLC, no less than 4 of which are required to make the game stop crashing in the first hour. They both have DRM that rootkits your computer, makes your cd drive stop working and wipes your hard drive if it ever detects a debugger or compiler on your system. One has a free demo, the other does not. Guess which one I'm going to be buying? That is the future of t
The Wii started offering Demos (Score:2)
Surprisingly, the Nintendo Wii began offering demos of Wiiware titles, and to a limited extent short time demos of Virtual console titles (such as through Super Smash Bros Brawl). The only companies that have something to worry about are the ones releasing horrible games where the demo causes people to test and not purchase the full version.
The movie industry offers demos in the form of Previews. Although comparing the two are like apple and oranges.
Nice! (Score:3, Funny)
Nice! They'll start giving the entire games for free now!
One of the worst examples of foot in mouth.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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video game reviews are generally of higher quality and more consistency than those for other products
You cannot be serious.
so ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do they need to be "demos" at all? (Score:3, Insightful)
If a game is a downloaded and bought online, how come I can't say, pay $5 for the first level, and if I like it, pay another $5 for the next level, etc?
episodic gaming (Score:2)
Play homemade levels instead (Score:2)
Allow us to share this free first level with all of our friends legally with no fear of lawsuits, so we can get them interested in the game as well.
So in other words, you propose reducing the full game to the status of an expansion pack. This runs the risk of the free demo becoming a substitute for the game. People might use the modding tools to make more levels for the shareware version, and then people will play those homemade levels instead of the official expansion pack.
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If your company can't offer value added over or at least equal value to "homemade" levels, you're likely in the wrong business.
Furthermore, you can just release high-quality mod tools above and beyond the quality that the public tends to provide and sell those as part of the pack.
Player mods didn't sink Quake or Doom (both of which could play mods in their free shareware version.)
Money down (Score:3, Insightful)
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Isn't that what a lot of online games do? You pay 10-15 to get closed beta access and that counts as credit for the full game.
If there's no free demo, there'll be "free" demos. (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't kill the free demo.
If you try, it turns out people will just obtain their demo any other way where they're not dishing out a single penny. Yes, I'm talking piracy. And they won't bother pirating the $5 demo, they'll pirate the full game, and use that to demo the game.
And console-only won't save you. All it takes is one person to say "Game XXX sucks". Friends of that guy then say "I heard game XXX sucks". And it then spreads quickly - after all, who's going to pay $5 for a demo of a game that sucks, nevermind buy the full game.
And all games suck - there is always someone unhappy with it.
Oh shut up (Score:5, Insightful)
I really don't like Crytek, they are bitchy to the extreme. They are also the ones who whined that piracy was "killing" Crysis sales. They didn't seem to account for the fact that you needed, as Yhatzee put it, "A hypothetical future computer from space," to play it well. They didn't seem to consider that maybe sales reflect how many people can play the game well, if it doesn't work someone won't buy it. Oh, and it wasn't a very good game either.
Never mind that it sold a million copies.
So they can cram it. I think free demos will indeed continue in part because you can't know if a game will work and the publishers fight to keep retailers from taking returns. With movies, you've got a very high chance it works. All you have to do is make sure you buy the right kind of movie, not hard these days. If so, it'll work unless it is damaged, in which case just swap it for a new one.
Not so with computer games, the media can be fine but there can be an incompatibility. In that case there is no reason someone should be stuck with a game that doesn't run.
Also games are a much more substantial purchase. $40 is the minimum you tend to see a new title for and $50-60 is more common. As such it is reasonable to want to try out the product a bit more before committing to a purchase. The larger a purchase, the more most people want to examine it.
But they can do whatever they like. I frankly don't care, they've shown themselves incapable of making games I give a shit about. They look very pretty, but only because they require insane amounts of hardware. In the two I've played (Far Cry and Crysis) the game starts off as a interesting semi-sneaky shooter with some very meh vehicles and then quickly turns in to a crappy monster game. As such I figure they'll keep doing that. If there's no demo, I'll simply give them a miss.
Pay for demos? I don't think so. (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait what? (Score:3, Insightful)
"He said: 'A free demo is a luxury we have in the game industry that we don't have in other industries such as film. " isn't a demo of a movie called a trailer?
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Not really. I mean, the Episode I trailer was entertaining....
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The truth of it is, it's not a fair comparison, movies (films) aren't interactive, games are, but for what his comparison is worth a demo of a film is the trailer...what else could you have?
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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...and playing Pacman on your Atari 2600? (Oh gawd, the pain!)
Actually, severely thinning the herd to make room for innovation is not such a bad thing. So go ahead Darwin candidates, charge for your demos.
more stupidity (Score:2)
Game "pirates" weren't going to buy your software anyway. You didn't lose millions of sales due to piracy.
Crytek CEO: Get over yourself.
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Some game "pirates" weren't going to buy your software anyway.
If game companies started producing things other than shitty console ports with draconian DRM schemes, perhaps the pirates would not have chosen to pirate in the first place. As long as these publishing houses continue to try to churn out cookie cutter crap aimed at piggybacking on the latest E! tonight 'psuedo-fad' IP, and actually start producing, quality, original, relatively 'open' games, the sooner their numbers will ris
Loosing a lot of money to piracy? (Score:2, Redundant)
Is someone forgetting that the video game industry is out grossing the movie theater industry? You are not loosing money, you are earning an English ass load of cash instead of a metric ass load of cash. You don't loose anything, you just gain slightly less.
Piracy? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
+1 Agree demos suck. (Score:2)
Public BETAs are much more relevant way to both promote your game and make as
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Now who downloads 2gb just to play 10 minutes of a game?
Not to play, but to evaluate. Does it run on my hardware? Is it really fun?
Let's face it, game reviewers are little more than an outsourced marketing department. I've got to look for myself to see what's what, or I'm not buying.
Some will clearly stick around. (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at the XBox 360's indie game market. That's the hobbyist/indy storefront for games people write with the XNA tools.
Every single game there gets a free demo, in that you can download every one of them for free. Even if the developer didn't code in any "demo" logic, if you don't pay, you get to run the game in a mode where it can't save any state and it auto-terminates after a short while.
A demo like that is cheap to implement. It's also something that, while the developers may not want to provide it, the people you buy your games from directly need for it to be there. Especially with digital delivery.
With digital delivery, there's no return policy, no trade-ins, no used game sales. This means if you shell out for an awful game, you're stuck with it. If I'm a digital delivery storefront, I'm going to want to entice people to buy games through me. The first time they buy an awful game and can't do anything about it, that's going to dramatically lower the odds that they'll buy any games in the future. The developer of that one game may not care -- they may be delighted, they got their cash -- but the storefront owner is going to care a lot, because they have an ongoing relationship with the customer.
And so you'll see things like the mandatory free demo we get with XBLA and "indie games" (perhaps coupled with the low-cost demo implementation you get for the "indie games").
(Honestly, I expect this mandatory demo policy to even make it to the iPhone app store at some point.)
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Especially with digital delivery. With digital delivery, there's no .... used game sales.
Except for Stardock & GoG.
Not a big loss for me (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't remember the last time that I played a demo, but then I tend to wait until the games are on special at around $5. If I really want something then I will pay $10 (like I did this weekend for Dirt 2 at Direct2Drive's current sale). Sure I am behind everyone else, but then often the worst of the DRM has been removed, major bugs fixed and there's enough reviews written by people who aren't getting paid to be positive about a game.
I feel if I can no longer resell games second hand due to activation or being tied to services like Steam then will only pay single digit amounts. It works for me because I got bored of multiplayer years ago.
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big disconnect (Score:2)
strange....but not unexpected from Crytek, among a growing number of dev studios who are becoming disconnected with their customers (PC gamers) which in turn drives down their own sales.
Look at Ubisoft or even "CRYSIS" (which has been categorized by many as being a "tech demo" rather than a game)
I do have to admit, the original Far Cry was awesome even with the gameplay and plot but pretty much every game coming from Crytek since then have been alienating gamers (not to mention their controversial comments
Haha (Score:2, Funny)
No demo = me pirating a full copy to try it out... (Score:2)
I download demos all of the time to evaluate games I am not familiar with. I downloaded the Virtual On demo for the X360 and then bought the game a week later. I download Super Puzzle Fighter HD for the PS3 based off of playing the demo. I hadn't even heard of Heavy Rain before I played the demo...and after playing the free demo from the PSN, I pre-ordered SIX fucking copies to give to my friends and coworkers when the game came out. Without demos I guarantee that I would own less than half as many games as
SEGA. Nintendo. Etc. (Score:2)
I think that the secret grumblings going on is that these developers are wishing for a time when the Sega Master System and the Nintendo Entertainment System roamed the earth.
You didn't really get demos of games for these, free for downloading at the time they were popular.
( - This ignores, of course, the Nintendo Play Choice 10 machines, and any Sega equivalent of the time, in which I'm sure plenty of us of the respective age range would beg mom for quarters to feed whilst she did whatever she was out and
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Best way for the Industry to defeat piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
These guys need to stop worrying about how many copies of their games are pirated and concentrate on getting more people to pay for their games. While it may be true that if they do absolutely nothing about people who pirate their games, more and more people will pirate the games rather than buy them, they are much more obsessed with stopping pirates than they are with getting paying customers.
Recommended System requirements aren't enough... (Score:4, Informative)
Piracy (Score:2, Interesting)
Are they TRYING to make excuses for failed games?
When people stop buying a $50-70 game because they don't know how good it is are they going to blame piracy again? Wtf.
I can see some part of his point. Most people who download the demo are already interested, so it's kind of redundant. I know of several games where I was uninterested until my friends told me to try the demo out.
I know people who sit around downloading demos to find which game they're going to buy next.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Piracy and free demos are... pretty well unrelated. But I can see why Crytek and EA would want free demos to go away. Because then gamers can find out that a game sucks before buying it.
Is that what I hear you saying, EA? Crytek?
EA: Fuck! We're out of good ideas!
Crytek: Us too!
EA: Kill the free demos before anybody finds out!
Crytek: Right away! Releasing demo-minators! Fuck! Thats a great idea for a game! We can tag it "They won't be back!"
Not to mention that games moving online is a penalty to piracy. Who
This can definitely work for some games (Score:2)
While I don't think this will ever work for all games, for some games I can definitely see them going without a demo (or even better, charging for it) and it going over well. Any new games will obviously still need trailers. If you have never heard of the game before (and especially if you don't know the studio), most people aren't going to shell out $60 without a demo. But for established franchises, no one really cares about the demo, they just play it to hold them over until the full game is out. Doe
Rubbish. (Score:3, Funny)
It'll never work (Score:2)
Piracy is here to stay.
author is a moron (Score:2)
We've had one serious rash [slashdot.org] of video game soothsayers predicting the end of exactly the business practices that make some facebook games so incredibly profitable. Sounds like these dumb asses see the industry changing, but lack any real comprehension.
If anything, the profitable future is giving away the game for free, but charging players for leveling, while encouraging payment through social factors.
Stipulation (Score:2)
This may be unpopular but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Games are not overpriced.
With movies, now, you shell out $12 a person, and of course you aren't by yourself but with a friend, S.O., etc, so it's really $24. But then you want popcorn and drinks, so actually it's $40. And if that's not enough, it's not interactive at all, and 2.5 hours later the experience is permanently over. Yet nobody bats an eye.
Tell them to spend 50% more on something that lasts orders of magnitude longer, is permanent, and can even be resold to recoup some of the loss and people st
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What? Malaria isn't fun? (Score:4, Funny)
I personally loved having to scrounge around for pills like a junkie in withdrawl.
Save complaints (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'd rather have a system where I can save wherever I want (which Farcry didn't have when I played it at launch)
Then you'd like continuous background autosave: wherever you are, there you are saved. But don't try quickloading, or the angry mole [wikia.com] will come down and kill you.