“An ideal demo walks a fine line between limitation and replayability.”

February 3, 2018 6:22 AM

The Three Essential Ingredients Of A Great Video Game Demo [Kotaku] “It may be a rare sight today, but a demo is one of the best things an upcoming game can do for its audience. Of course, not all demos are created equal—the best demos generate excitement and set expectations for what’s to come, while the worst demos convince us not to buy. What makes a great demo? What is a demo, really? Speaking in the strictest sense, a demo is a limited version of a game that people can play to get a better idea of the game itself. This can range from E3 demos, which may not be representative of the final project and aren’t accessible to the general public, to timed trials like ReCore’s, where players can do anything for a set amount of time. We could argue that shareware releases of games like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D were a kind of early demo too!”

• Which demo did you play to death? [PC Gamer]

“In the PC Gamer Q&A, our writers share their thoughts on one subject then encourage you to add your own suggestions in the comments. This week: which demo did you play to death? In the late '90s I could only afford a game a month, if I was lucky. So the cover-mounted demo disc was a godsend. And there was no demo I played more than Carmageddon, the preposterous, tabloid-bothering racing game in which pixelated pedestrians can be gruesomely run over. It's incredible that people found this nonsense offensive, but as a teenager I thought it was edgy as hell. The demo had a ten minute timer, but I played it hundreds of times until I memorised every corner of that foggy, low-res city level.”

• Whatever Happened to the Video Game Demo? [Playstation Lifestyle]

“Critics argue that releasing a demo can prove detrimental to the final product in that it can undercut sales momentum early on in a game’s lifecycle. Four years ago, Puzzle Clubhouse CEO Jesse Schell claimed that releasing a truncated version of ‘Game X’ can reduce sales by up to 50 percent. 50 percent! Clearly some developers won’t lose too much sleep mourning over the death of the demo, but is that really the right phrase to use? The death of the demo? Make no mistake, the golden age has long since passed, but perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the demo has simply taken on a new form — evolving with the times, as it were. Early access and beta programs have arguably rendered the concept obsolete, and when you couple this with rising file sizes and the sheer cost of AAA development, it’s small wonder why studios no longer consider the demo —”

• The Slow, Strange Death Of The Demo [Rock Paper Shotgun]

“Even in the last couple of years, the decline has been rapid – it’s a relative rarity to post about one on RPS now. Publishers seem to have settled on marketing and heavy, heavy promotion (often including bewildering ARGs) as the alternative – a surer way to drum up interest in and expectation for the game, and one that does so without the dread risk of a gamer discovering that, actually, they don’t like this all that much. For some really big games, the norm even seems to be not releasing a demo until weeks or months after the full release, presumably to help drum up those few stragglers who somehow resisted the pervasive trailers and advertisements. (Not PC-related, but I noticed a demo for Halo: Reach came out earlier this week. Timely, eh?) Adverts and trailers don’t tell you the truth, but so often they’re all we get to go on until embargoes lift and launch-day reviews land. In a very fundamental way, such marketing lies about the experience you’re going to have.”

• Remembering the Video Game Console Demo Disc [Gamasutra]

“Getting an early gameplay demo of an upcoming game wasn't always as easy as turning on a gaming system and downloading it via an online service like Xbox Live or PlayStation Network. Today, console game demos are distributed and acquired in a considerably different manner from years past. We won’t be examining the history of PC demos here (that’s another article altogether), but we will take a look at how console demos were distributed prior to the advent of online services like XBL and PSN. Gamers from the 8-bit and 16-bit era can attest that the idea of a game demo was absolutely unheard of in the cartridge era. Unlike modern disc based mediums (CD, DVD, Blu-ray), cartridges were too expensive to produce for sake of a demo. The closest thing to a demo in back then was single game store kiosks that one might find on occasion at a toy or department store. Gamers who were wise enough to send in the registration cards that came along with their games, systems, and magazine subscriptions were sometimes treated to preview videos (via VHS tapes) of upcoming hot games from major developers.”

• Demos are dead, long live demos [Polygon]

“A game demo is marketing. It's meant to get you to buy the game. The point of a demo is not to allow you to try the game. It's not meant to give you a taste of the whole experience. It's meant to sell you the game. It's a carefully culled slice of the game designed to leave you with a very specific impression of the game, one that may or may not match up with reality. That's the problem with demos, whether they're something you play at home or something the press plays at a show like E3. They should not, but not always are, a representative piece of the game to give you a sense of the whole thing. The industry calls that sort of video or playable section a "vertical slice," a piece of the game that gives you a taste of what it is and what it's offering. It slices through all the layers and gives you a bit of each one. But it can be misleading, and one of my favorite meta-games while playing something that I've tried at a press meeting at E3 is to try to find the chunk of the game that was used for a vertical slice.”

• Discontinued PS4 horror demo P.T. worth hundreds on eBay [Ars Technica]

“Want to sell a PS4 for big money on eBay? You probably can if you were smart enough to download a free copy of P.T. before it was removed from the PlayStation Store last week. P.T., the "playable teaser" demo promoting a new Silent Hill game, was a surprise hit among horror game fans, with its masterfully creepy atmospherics and sound design, after it was released as a free download last year. But the demo was removed from the PSN store with little warning last Wednesday, alongside news that Konami was canceling the Silent Hills project. Any of the over one million PSN users who previously downloaded the game can still play it from their hard drives, but earlier this week, Sony removed the ability to redownload the title once deleted from the system. That means the only way to play the game now is to have a PS4 that already had it installed before the hammer came down. Those systems should be able to play the game offline well into the future, provided they were the "primary" PS4 for the associated account.”

posted by Fizz (19 comments total)

I remember people played Battlefield 2's Gulf of Oman demo almost more than the main game. I certainly played it for months. In some ways I wonder if those Battlefield demos presaged the idea of one-map online shooters.

Nowadays most online games have a time limited "beta" which is both a demo and also serves to theoretically test server infrastructure. I think the Overwatch one probably demonstrated the concept to perfection as it drove a huge amount of hype for the game and also coincided with wider streaming of the game (which is also a sort of demo window for publishers).
posted by selfnoise at 7:15 AM on February 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

I think the game demo I've played the most was the original Grand Theft Auto. I think you had up to 15-20 minutes of gameplay and then it ended and everything would reset, but it was more than enough for me. Eventually, I pirated it.
posted by Fizz at 7:23 AM on February 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

Demos used to be a pretty big thing back then, these days, it feels only the yearly FIFA and PES demos register in the radar.
I recall playing two to exhaustion: Worms (had two levels) and Age of Empires (had a campaign and two maps not in the retail game and they were good enough for me to install the demo to get them in the full game), and perhaps my favourite level is one where you start with just a couple of priests and must wololo to kickstart a path to victory. At a point, I was making challenges such as converting villagers carrying gold or cut through the woods blocking the isthmus connecting both landmasses.

Demos were also a decent way to gauge how a game would run in our systems, at a time there would be a massive difference between a new and a three year old system because technology was making far bigger leaps than it is now, in much less time. These days, unless someone absolutely needs to play in 4k in ultra or whatevs, older rigs seems to hold on much better and if a game is particularly fussy with the specs, reviews and the comentariat seem to take notice. Another issue is magazines disappeared over the last decade, and even with them, demos went from things you could fit a couple in a floppy by the early 90s, to a couple dozens in a CD in the mid 90s, to maybe 3 or 4 on a DVD over the middle of the last decade and you can't really go anywhere from there particularly with bandwidth (for both users and companies) getting cheaper.
posted by lmfsilva at 7:30 AM on February 3, 2018

Back when I had a year's subscription to PC Gamer, the monthly demo disc was the highlight of the issue. Getting a taste of 5 - five whole games!! - was a blast to a cash strapped kid who got maybe two or three games for birthdays and christmas. I still play some of those series these days, so the demos did their job of advertising games to me I'd otherwise never had seen.

Second on the systems test for demos these days. I'd love to be able to gauge whether my laptop could handle more games these days, or whether it'd just chug and plod. Demo's have to be better than refunds, right?
posted by Lykosidae at 7:58 AM on February 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

NieR: Automata had an amazing demo, it was basically a deconstruction of action video games. An interesting mix of tutorial and immersion in a world and then just some really smart gameplay. Only it was a little misleading; the gameplay in the main game itself wasn't quite so creative or innovative. Fortunately the fall game is great in so many other ways I didn't mind. And the demo wasn't exactly a bait and switch, more that it was directed by someone with a very opinionated idea of game design that had a slightly different agenda than the game proper.
posted by Nelson at 8:05 AM on February 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

Second on the systems test for demos these days. I'd love to be able to gauge whether my laptop could handle more games these days, or whether it'd just chug and plod. Demo's have to be better than refunds, right?

Yeah, I appreciate that Steam tried to throw us a bone and you can play a game up to 2 hours and within 14 days. But it's very much a hassle and having a disc or a limited download would just be easier to get a feel for how it handles on my PC.

Also, Early Access games have kind of blurred that line between what is a demo and what is an actual game ready for release and play.
posted by Fizz at 8:12 AM on February 3, 2018

The demo for Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord had two scenarios; you could play them as many times as you wanted as either the Axis or Allies. I played that demo happily for two or maybe three years before finally buying the full game (by which time the price had come down significantly).
posted by nickmark at 8:41 AM on February 3, 2018

I had a subscription to Amiga Format from about 1990 to 94 primarily because of the cover mounted demo disks. My sister and I would play those short snippets to death for the whole month— if it was a 2 player game that was a particularly good month. The highlights were X-out, Lemmings (plus a couple of months later Xmas lemmings), and Sensible Soccer. Not sure how many games we bought off the back of the demos; Lemmings and Sensible Soccer once the price had dropped maybe one or two others. The depth of experience feels analogous to the situation where we were only able to listen to one or two records over and over again (because no internet & no money) and you learn every crack and pop of the vinyl and the exact length of every gap between every song.
posted by tomp at 8:54 AM on February 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

Still waiting on the full version of Gravy Trader.
posted by tobascodagama at 10:18 AM on February 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

Also, I played the fuck out of Quake's first level. So many hours of enjoyment. From a gaming magazine, I cannot recall which.
posted by Fizz at 10:28 AM on February 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

Nintendo is still big on demos (at least on the 3DS).

The Switch doesn't have as many demos as I'd like but for certain games they're there and I appreciate that they're mostly stand-alone downloads, so you can just live in that game and play in that world for as long as you want, the game itself if you decide to buy is a separate thing.
posted by Fizz at 10:42 AM on February 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

The Quake demo was one of the first explicit "performance tests" that I can remember. Really at the dawn of there being more than a couple of possible system CPU/etc combinations, and just before 3D accelerators (now GPUs) became mainstream.
posted by selfnoise at 10:45 AM on February 3, 2018

mechwarrior 2! jedi knight! fallout! so many good 1990s era demos.
posted by wibari at 11:27 AM on February 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

I loved PC Gamer for its demo disc. Not so much for Coconut Monkey. I also miss its bizarre spin-off PC Accelerator, though that was mostly because I was a teenage boy, so a magazine that was "PC Gamer meets Maxim" was naturally going to be a big hit.

Anyway, the earliest demo I can explicitly recall playing was Command & Conquer, which was on the PC Gamer disc, which I remember in part because the 3 levels it gave you were in increasing order of difficulty, yet out of order from the levels in the final game, and they never fixed that Lv. 6 (Command blowing up SAM sites) was harder than Lv. 11 (First time getting Orca Helicopters).

It was because of that game that I discovered that the studio (Westwood) was not just in my hometown (Las Vegas), but damn-near right down the street. I went down there once to see if I could find out anything cool, met the crew, and ended up beta-testing everything Westwood made from Red Alert through Generals.
posted by mystyk at 12:22 PM on February 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

Both the demo to Diablo 1 and Fallout 1 were in PC Gamer (different issues). I had never heard of either game, so the demos blew my mind, and I will never ever forget my reaction to The Butcher!
posted by Beholder at 12:36 PM on February 3, 2018 [4 favorites]

Speaking of console demos, I just recalled Keio Flying Squadron for the Mega CD. Basically, the demo was just the full game with a splash screen after the first level. All fine and dandy, until someone noticed the level select cheat was not disabled, and you could bypass the first level and play the rest of the game. Ooops.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:30 PM on February 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

Half-Life: Uplink.
posted by gucci mane at 2:43 PM on February 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

The industry calls that sort of video or playable section a "vertical slice," a piece of the game that gives you a taste of what it is and what it's offering. It slices through all the layers and gives you a bit of each one

The vertical slice is surely the most frustrating portion of game development. Just as with a cake, there are several ways to make a good vertical slice. One is to start with an entire cake, and cut out a slice. The other is to bake an entire cake in the shape of slice taken from a larger cake. The third is to bake layers of cake and vertically assemble them. None of these things leave you much closer to having an entire saleable cake, i.e. the very thing the vertical slice ostensibly is a step towards.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 1:52 AM on February 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

Played the absolute living heck out of Carmageddon and of course the first shareware episode of the original Doom. Then one disk (an actual floppy disk) had a demo level of a little game called UFO: Enemy Unknown and I can honestly say I sank more time into that single mission level than any game since, with the exception of sprawling RPGs. And a month or so later, stuck to the front of a different magazine, a UFO: Enemy Unknown demo...of an entirely different level! AMAZING.
posted by turbid dahlia at 1:53 PM on February 4, 2018 [3 favorites]