Should demos make a comeback? 5 replies

There's been the odd demo recently like the Resi 2 oneshot and the Forza Horizon 4 demo.

But they're nowhere near as prolific as they used to be.

Do you miss demos? Would they tempt you into buying a game more if it had a demo?

Yes. They should. Leap-of-faith purchasing shouldn't be a thing. Having demos means you have the balls to show bits of your game off for free, meaning you're quite confident it's good. "Hi, we made this game, here's basically how it looks like, we're sure you'll love it, give us $60 if when you want more."

Demos were how you know if you like a game or not. If you like the game, you buy the full game.

If you don't like the game, you don't waste the hundreds of moneys on pre-ordering the game on multiple platforms, then buying the Season Pass box of mystery.

As simple of a concept as a demo was, it was very effective. I absolutely say they need to return.

Yeah I think it should. Demos gave us a chance not only see what a game had to offer and whether or not we enjoyed it, but also allowed us to continually tweak the settings and try different graphics options to see how our PCs handled it.

I think the free week-end events on platforms like Steam serve the same thing nowadays. Also, even without free temp access, the internet makes it pretty easy to learn a lot about a game these days prior to spending money on it. 

So I don't really miss demos, even though I really liked the concept back in the day.

Demo discs were one of the main things back in the day. Now... well, free snapshots are fine and all, but the download size for a game can be a bit excessive. I mean 40 gb or so to try a game? How long's that going to take? For myself, I know that it wouldn't be particularly fast. It's not something that you can just fire up of the weekend and play through a half dozen demos.

I don't think we have cheap dense (relative to the size of the things we're talking about) information storage any more. If I could pay £5 to have someone ship me 10 game demos a month, yeah I probably would.

-shrug-

I miss it, I find games a lot harder to find out about than I used to. Like yeah, if you know the name of the game (no pun intended) you can just look it up, but I find them harder to discover in the first place.