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(First posted on our site here)
Many years ago, when we first started making games, the perceived wisdom of the age was to follow an apparently successful formula, and strike it rich. Or at least, make a living. Games sold for an average of $20 or so. This is in the dim, dark depths of history, in 2003. This formula was: offer a demo, and convert demo players into customers by having amazing demos (and, as a secondary, offer a money back guarantee just in case a customer mysteriously wasn't satisfied).
All you need is a large enough influx of traffic downloading a large enough number of demos and a large enough conversion rate. Simple! And this we have done, for the last 10 years. To cut a long story short, it doesn't work for us. Today, none of our games have a demo, and they probably never will have again, either. The Demo is dead.
Long Live Video!
Why have we done this? How can we possibly gain from no longer hosting demos? Well, the times have changed. I have come to realise that I've not bought a single game from playing a demo in the last 5 years, maybe longer. Why am I buying games? Or rather, why am I buying the games I am buying as opposed to other games? Mostly because they're recommended to me by friends, and sometimes reviews. That generally isn't enough though; I also want to look at the game before I buy one.
And this is where video comes in! Just about every game I've bought for the last 5 years has been on the basis of watching a video of the game - either a review along the lines of Total Biscuit, or a trailer in Steam, or on the developers' websites, or shared on Facebook or Twitter. Usually I don't even need a recommendation from a friend if I watch a trailer for a game that I think looks interesting. But there is another thing at play. Almost none of the games I've bought have even had demos. They're full versions only, accessible only via Steam, and/or usually... rather cheap. And with a bit of investigation we've noticed that 99.9% of all the games we've sold on Steam have been bought "blind", without anyone ever sampling a demo. This got me to wondering why we are bothering with demos any more.
What Does a Demo Do?
I'll tell you: it has three primary functions:
- To assure the end user that the product actually installs and runs ok on their machine
- It gives the potential customer a good long demonstration of the game with no up-front investment on their part
- The shocker: it then gives them 99 excuses not to buy the game.
Video manages to sidestep 2 and 3 nicely. Video still gives the customer a demonstration of the game, albeit non-interactive; but it does have the potential to cram all the interesting bits into a very short space of time - rather like a movie trailer does. But, barring a total disdain for the style or genre of game, it doesn't give the customer any reasons not to buy the game. Not a single one. You have to actually pay to form an opinion on how it plays.
The first function is trickier. Why do people buy something if they don't know if it'll even run or not? It turns out it's required a little bit of technical wizardy to solve, which we'll be releasing the source to in due course as it's GPL, but basically - take a look at Revenge of the Titans now, if you're unregistered, and you'll see that the title screen has in fact been replaced by the video trailer which is now rendered inside the game. So we know at this point that the game is going to run fine on your machine, and more importantly, so do you. We're slowly converting the other three games into video title screens as well.
In-App Purchase
Of course, once a potential customer has installed the game, fired it up, and been presented with the trailer video instead of an ordinary title screen, that's not quite the whole story. Customer clicks "PLAY"... and is transported straight to an in-app purchase screen which you can use to unlock the game there and then. Unfortunately this IAP screen can only take credit and debit cards (no PayPal or other dubious payment systems).
However... it is working, and working nicely. Now all our games have a built-in IAP system (and a cunningly built-in one-click buy mechanism too), we'll be able to collect some stats on how things look without demos, and I'll be following up in a few months about the end result.
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1. The price is heavily discounted (like during a Steam 75% off sale).
2. It's from a developer who has a track record of putting out games that I really like (and by "developer" I mean a person like Hideo Kojima, David Cage, etc., not a company).
Especially with indie PC games where I'm not familiar with the developer, I've frequently been turned off of games by the lack of demo. There have been lots of instances of me hearing a game is interesting, going to the game's Steam page, and then ignoring the title entirely because there was no demo available for me to gauge the quality of the product. It would be like buying a CD from a new band even if you've never heard a song by them before; why would I do that?
.. you are indeed unusual. 99% of our sales have been on Steam to people who have never seen a demo (or often, even heard of us before). Conversely, only 1% of the people who play our demos actually buy a game.
How much gauging of quality do we really need for something costing under $10? It's kinda hard not to have a few hours fun with a new game you've just bought.
You can buy lots of albums as MP3 downloads for $10. How often have you bought an album from an artist you're not familiar with who you've never heard a song by?
Along with track record and word of mouth, demos are a major factor for me in determining which games to buy. It's true that without one, the player has to pay before being able to form an opinion on gameplay, but this is a very double-edged sword for the vendor, who becomes unable to demonstrate elements like how character control feels. This is where a movie-style trailer falls short, as it simply isn't capable of expressing much of what makes the work interesting; much the same reason, I imagine, why movies themselves aren't demoed through a textual description.
That's absolutely true, but for what it's worth:
Direct (non-steam sales) accounted for 40-50% of our overall revenue, and the vast majority (>75%) of the traffic that led to those sales came from our browser-based demo, mostly from Kongregate/Newgrounds, as well as people playing the demo on our site. MiniJuegoesGratis.com also contributed a fair bit.
Even so, this is 1 data point. No idea if results are typical.
Right. To be clear, I totally support your conclusion. I just think it's interesting that we've had such different experiences. My guess is the difference comes from platform (downloadable vs. web), genre, and many other little variables. And of course, it remains to be seen whether our good demo results aren't just an outlier from dumb luck.
However, from a user experience standpoint, I'm not sure your "free-to-download, but oh wait, you actually have to pay to get the game" model will be viewed by customers all that well. Do you somehow let them know ahead of time that it takes money to unlock the game? Otherwise, wouldn't people leave really bad reviews feeling they were tricked into thinking it was a F2P game? But it was actually a pay-to-play game?
Steam sales: 23,751
Steam demo plays: 13,153
Steam demo conversions: 4,698
Steam demo conversion rate: 35.7%
So 55% of all our Steam players tried the demo, and about 20% of our sales came directly from the demo.
Our conversion rate for our direct sales was harder to track, but seems to be somewhere between 2-4%. The vast majority of our direct sales traffic came from the flash portals where we uploaded our browser-based demo (Kongregate & Newgrounds, mostly).
Our results may not be typical, however. Data from your own games is probably the best indicator for what you should do with your next one.
Upon going back and scratching my head to ask why, I think it entirely boils down to the medium/visual quality of the two games. I am very unlikely to spend money for any flash-based gaming. The games tend to be too shallow, and the quality is rarely there. So for me, it really took playing the demo to assure me that heck yeah, Defender's Quest was a lot of fun and worth paying for. Whereas with a visually sexier product I probably would have just snagged it for exactly the same price with a video.
That's not to say there aren't any good Flash games out there (still hooked to HD Xyth), but just that my underlying expectation is different, which probably leads to a different effective marketing solution.
If I come across a demo and the game turns out to not be to my liking well then of course I don't buy the game. Though some gems like 'Protect Me Knight" come across my path and I find myself playing the demo through multiple times. Convinced that it's a game I'll enjoy I buy the game. As the game had local co-op I of course showed it off to my friends and got them to try it. It's now something everyone plays at get-togethers.
do you want to give Beta a nickname?
we have just made our demo's time limited, and try to make gamers feel special and excited for being "allowed" to play them, thye have realy not left at all..
"99 reasons not to buy a game". Well congrats, you just gave us one more.
In the way back long long ago nearly 20 years ago I could buy games on computer or console that were fun and, here's a big one, worked. Long ago it was a big deal to patch games which often involved mailing patch discs to customers. Postage could get expensive so a whole lot of polish went into games to avoid the trouble of actually having to fix paying customers games utilizing disc copies and shipping. Oh, you could also return bad games, mind blowing right? I don't think I ever bought a bad game for 10 years until games became big busines and everyone was assumed to have the internet.
Now you can't get a game even on console, on release day, without sitting back a few minutes while it gets patched. Good luck returning opened games too, even same day, and how many reviews can you actually trust not to gloss over how bad a game is and risk upsetting an advertizer?
Game sales are slipping on every platform and I think a big part of it is a lack of trust after being burned way too many times for too long.
You think a videos enough? Aliens Colonial Marines is just the most obvious game to fudge videos recently.
Now I'm obviously not your target audience if you even think I'm going to buy one of your games without a demo, but if your demos haven't been enough to sell your games in the past have you ever considered it might be your games? If you can't hook me with at least 5 minutes of novelty and fun I can't imagine you building up much of a base. I've got plenty of money to burn on games these days, hell I've got more games to play than time to play them, but if you think I'm throwing cash blindly or without trying something out to make sure it's not all flash I gotta question your merits. Admittedly there seem to be a lot of people watching other people play games now, but I'm not one of them as if I have that time I'm playing them myself, and I seriously doubt that would work as a successfu long term selling point. Fun to watch does not even begin to equate to fun to play.
Game sales are growing on every platform, btw. The problem is that there are an awful lot more games than there used to be; the shares are getting smaller even as the pie grows.
There's a reason for this, actually. Modern console games are orders of magnitude more complicated than the cartridge-based console games you're fondly recalling from the late 80's and early 90's. Most AAA games contain several million lines of code, and hundreds of thousands of data files, often with complex interdependencies. Tens of thousands of bugs and crashes will get fixed before a AAA console game is shipped. (I worked on one where the record for most bugs fixed in a single day across the whole team was something like 1,300 bugs.) At the very end when it ships, there will still probably be hundreds of mild bugs which the team is aware of, but that ended up not being fixed due to time constraints and the risk of inadvertently breaking something else while trying to fix them. Believe me, we try very hard to make sure the game we ship at retail is as solid as possible and has no major/showstopper problems. But if a serious problem slips through and ends up needing to be patched, it is usually something that only a small percentage of players will encounter. But with millions of sales that might still be many thousands of players.
Anyway, it seems to me that the QA efforts for modern AAA games are as good as they have ever been. I know players tend to complain "this game is buggy" after encountering a handful of minor bugs, but at least they have the luxury of not knowing how much worse it was, two months before it shipped!
I prefer Indie and F2P titles, as both are much more worried about their userbase and deliver quality and are fast at fixing things normally cause they know how heavy the impact will be when they fail to do so as they can not throw in a 50M marketing budget to cover the fact that the game is as trashy as CoD, MW or BF
SAVE THE LAST HUMAN FAMILY
...then, throw you into the thick of the action: a baptism of fire. No extended cutscenes about a brooding cop grieving for his dead wife that has nothing in common with the actual gameplay you encounter in the body of the game. No preamble. Just instant drama, like the opening of a James Bond movie... you can always go back and do exposition and dialogue later. Flashbacks are underused too. Most FPS games start you off in a safe training camp crawling under some barbed wire to ensure that you have learnt their particularly idiosyncratic controls for how to go prone, but you could start off without a weapon behind enemy lines pursued by enemies of unknown antagonism, gradually being prompted to use the appropriate control to sprint, slide, mantle, or jump as you flee.
Furthermore, I have bought a number of XBLA and XBLIG games by selecting Download Trial and playing the demo until it gives me the opportunity to carry on playing or lose the score / progress / achievements that I have so far accrued. About half the time I purchase these, the rest of the time I have already quit because of boring opening titles, cutscenes, training modes for a role that I don't even know that I want to adopt in a world that I don't necessarily care about, controls that I hate and can't redefine, with quality occasionally so poor that it crashes! It is a pity that the same system isn't available for AAA games, that the Xbox LIVE Marketplace makes me wait months for a game that was available in stores to appear as an "easy to switch between" digital download, that the savings made from cutting out the cost of making a physical disc, boxing it, transporting it, shelving it in a rented shop and selling it via generally inept staff can't be passed on to me in a reduced price - for something that I can't resell to a third party.
So, I am in favour of demos. However, only of final code at launch - not some beta that may change and end up woefully misrepresentative - and only when coupled to incentives like it keeping your new high score / progress / achievements, with as little preamble / training as it can get away with: so I can try genres outside my comfort zone and like the best strawberries it puts forward like the archetypal greengrocer selling his wares.
I have played demos I have disliked and then loved the actual complete game.
It's usually a case by case basis for myself. Many times the demo is a poor example of the actual game.
With demos, I feel its a lot like the account lock/resell issue. Its important for 70$ games, but might not be important for 1-10$ games.
Also, I find it interesting that so many replies here are rejecting the idea purely from a consumer point of view. It's good to gauge your decisions on how you yourself like to interact with your games - but hard data like this is really useful to test our assumptions about what consumers actually do.
In a weird coincidence, I was just talking about this with a coworker last night.
But above such a range, I would expect the 'no demo' approach to fail at least for this kind of games as it requires the mouth to mouth PR (even if in digital communities) simply cause its beyond the 'impulse spending limit' which is somewhere in the range of $2-$10 depending on country and age.
If it were possible to sell games without that and without demos, EA would have stopped creating demos long ago (actually they tried to do that at least twice the past 10 years but were forced to do post launch demos due to worse than expected launch sales) but not even their 50M+ / blockbuster PR budget can compensate for it on AAA priced games.
The last big game that I can remember having a demo was Just Cause 2 and both that and the final game were extremely popular, because Avalanche made sure people knew about the demo. Putting a button on the Steam page after release or a 2 paragraph post on your Facebook page/website is not going to attract customers to try out your game so of course you're not going to see many player do that.
If you're going to use demos then you have to a) release them slightly before the full game. b) make them a prominent part of your marketing plan.
Many commenters here have commented from an idealist consumer perspective. However, this blog post was from a business perspective. It doesn't look at your indivudual data points. It just looks at the behaviour of hundreds of thousands of people instead. If everybody who ever bought a game based on a demo - and that includes me - piped up and said what a shitty, anti-consumer thing this is to do, you'd still not even make up 5% of the number of people who just didn't give a crap and bought just because they saw a video and their friends said it was good.
The Extra Credits video is linked in the Puppygames blog post right at the top if anyone wants to listen to it. I'm just quite pleased that we've arrived at the same conclusion after 10 years, 8 releases, millions of downloads, and hundreds of thousands of customers, and a good, long, hard look at the facts rather than just poking our heads in the sand and hoping it all went away.
http://xkcd.com/552/
Isn't the point of a demo to get the word out that your game exists, raising awareness? In my yesteryears the only thing exposing me to new games was the PlayStation Magazine and its demo discs. I could play several games and form a make-or-break opinion about them, or in some cases play the demos enough to leave me content enough in the games to not need to buy them (yesteryears me also had limited money).
Now, we have magazines, online reviews, videos, video-commentaries and a myriad of ways to both find and market games. Demos are just a small part in the machinery, and I also doubt that it's an all too important one. _Very_ rarely have I ever bought a game because of a demo, and I haven't heard of many others who have.
Though there's of course always the danger of the me-bubble, in another country demos might be the main way that games get distributed and marketed. Anyone aware of something such?
In short, I also think that people defending the demo is defending the ideal. I don't think that demos sell games in a significant scale.
As for Lars Doucet's game, if it he wouldn't have put up the demo on Kongregate, there's no chance that I would have bought it. Because otherwise I would never had heard of it. Bam, marketing.
If the argument is that demos are needed since quantity of low-quality games has increased (most likely due to sub-par games earning way more than they deserve, so why bother?), I would much rather focus on changing the industry at that fundamental level which promoted this. Demos still exist, and games are still pirated. I do very much doubt that demos will heal this - if they even were that effective as converters to start with.
Don't get me wrong, I loved demos and they were a fond part of my childhood. Preserving them for our next generations would warm my heart. But if I'm to look at it honestly and from a business point of view, I'm not that convinced that demos sell games.
Demos are a good ideal for digital only titles.
$10 imo is alot to pay for a thumbnail on steam (or other DDL service) that reminds you, you spent money for something that sucked or just didn't work. And as we all know those thumbs can add up pretty fast if you're buying $10-20 games.
Iffy non demo titles get pushed to the back of the priority line when i'm searching for new a DDL title to buy.
If people don't buy a game becouse of the demo then its the demo or the game that is the problem.
I would personally love to see this expounded upon. What exactly are those excuses? Are those excuses that are bypassed entirely with a blind sale? Or do those excuses turn into buyer regret after a blind sale?
I think that is important. If someone plays a demon and decides to not buy the game, you have actually done that player a service. You have given them the opportunity to save their money and avoid regret. Sure that may not do you any immediate good, but if played right, it could be turned to your benefit.
But you have more data on all that and I am not entirely sure how your demos were set up.
The most notable example I can think of is Tales of Vesperia: the demo was just super tedious and culminated in a really difficult boss fight if you hadn't been playing the game already for some time (which was impossible in the context of the demo.) It was a real turn-off.
I think that's a good example of the mechanism in action: I ended up buying the game not because of but in spite of the demo (and it turned out to be quite a good game!)
Yeah, that is one of the problems of a demo. You can have varying qualities between the demo and the full game.
But if your demo sucks but your game is great, then the problem is with how you created your demo, not the demo in theory. I am sure that had the designers taken greater care, the Tales demo could have been a lot better.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/demo-daze
My real point was this: great game, bad demo can happen. But this backs up the exact point he's making with this post. If I had never encountered the ToV demo I would have bought the game based on brand loyalty and its videos. The demo gave me a reason to NOT buy that would not have existed if the demo hadn't! I had to work past the demo and buy the game anyway in spite of it. (And I was not disappointed!)
Just something I thought about as I was reading through the comments.
A demo is there to not only show the game in action but to also sale the game.
If you find that people were giving reasons not to play maybe you should list them and then try and fix those.
In my own experience I've bought many a game due to the demo and I'm more weary of a game that doesn't. What does that game have to hide bar that it's rubbish not to let me have a minor hands on with the action.
Also I've found people are more likely to buy a full product through different market places. Take the play store for example. Many games such as Where's My Water, use the demo as a sales device and use it successfully.
If they buy after watching your video, all you know is they like your video.
Check if there is a demo available. If a demo is available I will test it and if the game was good I will buy it, if it wasn't I will not.
If no demo is available I check if a friend own the game. If I have a friend that own the game I ask them what they think about the game, if they like it I ask if they mind letting me try it. After I tried it, if I liked it, I will buy it. If I didn't like it I wont buy it.
If none of my friends has the game, I will not buy the game. I am not going to buy a game I cannot test first. A trailer is not going to help me decide, I wanna "feel" the game first. A trailer will not give me this.
Trailers will give a glorified reflection of the game, and might end up with making me feel ripped of because the trailer and the game gave two different impressions.
If I don't like the game enough I can just check a stream where someone play the game from start to finish.
For me and the majority of my friends at the game development course at the university I attend demos is a must to decide if we will invest in a game. Saying people doesn't wanna try before they buy is plain wrong, any person that can test a game before buying it will do just that.
If the demo is bad it will reflect on how the player decide, limiting what the player can do in the demo is not a good model. Give the player a demo with full functionality to test the game is much better. The demo must be tailored for the genre not just chop away functionality.
I have 105 games on steam, almost of them I have tested before buying them, I have probably tried three times as many in total and most of them would have been a waste of money for me. The games I bought without testing was games in the same series for example Skyrim, I have played Oblivion and liked it, so it is a good chance I will like Skyrim too, and I did.
Simply put: Demos aren't dead, do it right and it will be a valuable tool for the game.
I think in the end people buy games because whatever was shown of that game was awesome and spoke to them. It's easier to make videos of a game than a proper 'demo' (and no, just letting people play for X minutes or a single level doesn't count). Craft an awesome experience in the game-world that is part of the narrative and can be played in 10 minutes to whet the appetite and you've got yourself a good promotional piece for your game; same deal with a video of the game, these aren't mutually exclusive you know.
Another counterpoint would be data on "lite" games such as Space Invaders Infinity Gene or Civilization Revolution. Those are basically demos. Lite games are popular on the App Store, so data on them would be quite relevant.
As for my personal shopping experience: I'd guesstimate that I've tried several demos over the past couple of years, and I only thought one (Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Gates of Infinity) was not worth buying. If there had not been a demo, I would have been fooled by the videos, bought the game, and become angry at Nintendo/TPC for releasing such a piece of crap that cuts so many features from previous versions. So, it seems to me that demo-less games have the potential to increase short-term profits if people are sold only on video marketing, but they can also cause consumer backlash if the game is unappealing compared to the videos, which hurts long-term profits for the developer.
I’ve been a lifelong video game enthusiast but it’s very hard for me to get excited about a video game anymore. Everything has been done to death. Just like with movies, music, and books, there are more videogames being made than people have time to play them. Too many art majors in the world. I think we are due for a new entertainment medium so all artists can start from scratch again.
At this point the only video game that would excite me would be a mash up of uncommon settings and genres. A Red Dead Redemption where the battles are done with squads and is turn based. Think XCOM:EU in a western setting, where the strategic layer is replaced by the free roaming and stories of RDR. Put differently, think RDR with turn-based squad combat replacing the shitty gunfights. I’d generously back a kickstarter for that if it comes from a reputable developer. Better to spend $120 on a quality refreshing concept than buying 2 AAA re-hashes, 6 average PC games, or 60 extra-shitty-5-minute-and-you’re-done iOS games.
Going to a movie theatre?
Trying a new restaurant?
Buying a DLC pack on any platform?
Paying shipping on any physical good whatsoever?
Trying a new beer? (Or most non-alcoholic beverages, for that matter.)
I'm sorry, but you just said you will never again pay for a $3 game on Steam without a free demo. I can't really take that seriously.
This is a major thing for me and why I purchase so few PC games. I was dying to play a game like Diablo III but I was so wary of it not running on my system that I didn't buy it. I still had the urge for loot games so I went out and purchased Too Human and Dungeon Siege III. A terrible decision in hindsight but I was more willing to risk my money on games that might suck but I knew I could play rather than risk it on a game I might not be able to install.
the game is a dungeon crawler/ shop simulation game , the genre, concept, and style all were turn offs this wasn't the type of game i usually buy and ESPECIALLY not the type of PC game I buy but then I tried it ...and I loved it. I loved it so much I actually ended up buying the discounted complete collection of games from that studio .
mu8ch like anything there's a right way to present and create demos and a wrong way . a poor demo will make your game look bad, a demo not representative of the final product will make your game look bad ( loved brutal legend but fully understand everyones complaints about the demo versus the final game) , and if I can get 99 reasons not to buy your game from a demo.....well I probably didn't want the game in the first place.
Then they have the full game unhindered by payment, and since they have 100% of the content to demo the title who knows how far they may get before deciding they like it (maybe even beat it) and decide that it has no replay value so why buy it now?
Having no demo that the dev can curate the content of seems like shooting yourself in the foot since people will seek out their own demo methods regardless.
I would definitely say a trailer or better yet a video showing someone playing the actual game and talking about some interesting parts would go further than a demo because a player is starting cold with a demo.
And realistically people don't have the time to wade through demos to determine if they want to buy a game. The people that do that probably have a lot more time than money and aren't the most attractive customers.
Bingo. I think this argument pretty much ends the discussion.
"To cut a long story short, it doesn't work for us. Today, none of our games have a demo, and they probably never will have again, either. The Demo is dead."
..is like saying: I don't like beer, I don't want to do anything with beer. Beer won't be liked by anyone anymore. Beer is dead. I don't have to explain how this does not make a lot of sense, do I?
From the first comment
".. you are indeed unusual. 99% of our sales have been on Steam to people who have never seen a demo"
You call someone unusual (who is probably not even among your target group), then in the article use your own opinion as a reference as well (and not that of the study of your target group):
"Just about every game I've bought for the last 5 years has been on the basis of watching a video of the game"
Then [article] you're talking about 99 excuses, yet don't give any proper examples, at least not even close to 99.
"You have to actually pay to form an opinion on how it plays."
Which is not very common in the world of software and movies;
For software, a trial gives a good overview of what the software has to offer to you and whether or not you can achieve your goals using that software. With movies, a trailer is good enough because there is not interaction at all.
Whereas with a game, the interaction is one of the most important features making a game a game. If in a "trailer" a highly skilled player is playing I don't expect them to make mistakes or misassumptions an untrained player can easily make.
On a personal note, may or may it not matter to you: I often like a demo before I spend money on games at all unless the game comes from a company/designer I do expect nothing but quality from (Valve/Rockstar).
If I don't get that demo, I'm highly unlikely to buy a game unless I've played it before at someone else, is highly recommended to me through reading reviews (the strong points of the game returning in multiple reviews please me) OR when I torrented it.
And that final part makes it in 90% of the cases a lost sale (in your view, because maybe I didn't want to pay for the game and barely played it anyway), because most of the people cannot be bothered to buy the game when they already have it installed and it works fine for them.
Maybe you should reconsider and research what the contents of the demo for your game should be to have a higher conversion rate because currently from this article, I doubt there's a lot of reason to drop demo's.
From my personal experience (just as fallacious, but a little more controversial), I generally don't play a demo unless I'm already considering buying the game, probably because I've already seen screenshots, videos and probably positive reviews. In which case, unless the demo really appeals to me beyond the average reviewer, they haven't increased my opinion at all. There are plenty of demos out there for games I'm not interested in, which could theoretically increase my chances of buying that game, were it not for the fact that I'm not downloading demos for games I'm not interested in.
As a general reply to various comments here, because Gamasutra doesn't allow "replies" past depth 1, here are some further musings:
"99 Reasons To Not Buy Your Game" - this is clearly an exaggeration for literary impact, and if that's not obvious to you, for shame. But instead of just asking me what those reasons are, maybe you could engage in devil's advocacy, and think of some yourself. Here are some I thought of, spuriously:
Reason 1. I got my fill of gameplay already from the demo. (Our demos typically gave away 25% or so of the full game progression)
Reason 2. I've had 90% of the initial delight of the game for nothing. Paying some money for the remaining 10% is a waste of money.
Reason 3. I can't be bothered to pay for it when I can go and play another free demo somewhere else.
Reason 4. I've already got a bunch of games I've paid for but not yet even played. Maybe I'll not bother getting this one yet.
Reason 5. I played the demo ages ago and forgot all about it by the time payday came because something else distracted me in between.
Reason 6. I only buy games through Steam.
Reason 7. I'm a poor student/waster/single mum and I don't spend money on games especially when I can be entertained endlessly by demos for nothing.
Reason 8. I loved the game except for this one small thing that I didn't like like I can't remap the fire button to X and for that reason alone I'm not going to buy it.
Reason 9. I thought the game was too easy but that's because the demo can only show the first 10 levels which have to be easy to not put off the 95% of people who find it too hard.
"The Nature of Puppygames Demos"
Few people here are aware of the exact nature of our demos, or even our games, and it's probably worth researching because our games are of a particular ilk and available only on a particular platform. We make desktop arcade games mostly, and that's a pretty strange niche to begin with, which substantially effects the way demos work.
Our demos were "full" versions of the games, which could be unlocked by registration (no further download). They tended to let you play the first 25% or so of the game unfettered before expiring on a cliffhanger (eg. first boss appears, or you're just about to see the next "world", for example).
Claims that we're "doing demos wrong" are from people who, I suspect, have not been doing this for as long as we have. The fact is, our demos were more or less no different from nearly every other demo I've ever seen. They weren't even *unsuccessful* either - they converted at an industry-respectable rate, AFAIK. The problem is that rate is shit.
Context Is Everything
The context of pricing and market positioning, specifically. Over the last 10 years we've seen the average price of an indie game plummet from $20 (sold direct by the developers) to $5 (sold on Steam or BigFish in a sale) to about $1 (sold in a bundle of some sort). Steam pioneered the price slashing in the market - I'm sure you educated types with economics degrees have a special name for this manoeuvre. In the space of a couple of short years, direct sales plummeted to less than 1/10th of what they used to be (and they were never great). Almost overnight, the chances of being an actual indie developer - and succeeding! - have dropped from "you'll be lucky" to "you've as much chance of winning the lottery". Not only has consumer expectation of prices been eroded from $20 to $5, but consumers have also been taught by Steam to buy on the basis of video and recommendation.
Then, just as things didn't seem they could get more crazy, along comes the Humble Indie Bundle, and we're now becoming accustomed to picking up titles for a dollar or less. Again, demo unseen. We're conditioned to buying stuff because it is *cheap* not because we *want* it. I say "we" - yes! I am one of you. I am a consumer. I've got a hundred games in my Steam library. I am doing all these things. I won't buy a game if it's not on Steam any more. I won't buy a game if it costs over $10. And so on.
In this context, we now see that 95% of our income - ANY developers income - comes not from conversions of demos, but from sales via gatekeepers and bundles. What the focus of my article is really about is that there is a case for simply dropping prices through the floor and not giving anything away for free. There is "free" stuff everywhere, already. The differentiator we now have is that if you want to sample our stuff, it will actually cost you. Otherwise it is simply unavailable. It is out of reach. You can look through the glass into the shop but you can't touch it until you spend a (paltry) amount of money.
Reason 1: Historically, demo's have been a single zone, or level. If you give away 25% of your content in a demo, That is your mistake, not a flaw with demo's.
Reason 2: See above.
Reason 3: See my response to reason 1, and additionally, If a consumer can't be bothered to pay for it, he won't whether a demo is available or not.
Reason 4: That is every consumers right, and is almost a certainty in today's market. You want to sell your game? Make it so good people actually want to play it.
Reason 5: If your game is so unmemorable, that people forget about it, then you have failed, not the concept of a demo.
Reason 6: Many developers release non-steam demo's(evidenced by other replies), and do reasonably well.
Reason 7: Waster eh? That's how you see your potential customers? I don't think demo's are your problem buddy...
Reason 8: Again, This is more seemingly saying "My demo highlighted a design oversight in my game. Better not give them a demo"
Reason 9: Then you have balancing issues in your game.
Overall, your article, and responses, seem to indicate that you have moved away from demo's because you seek to hide flaws in your game, in order to improve revenue streams, rather than address the real issue, which is that your product is poorly designed or implemented(by you & your, I mean the royal sense).
Also, if you place a pay-wall in your app, of course you will get some users paying(evidenced by your data), but I wonder how many of those would give you repeat business afterwards.
I also have to point out, that in the days of the Playstation 1&2, Xbox, and obviously PC, Demo's were frequently given away on cover discs with magazines. I remember, in particular, playing the demo for Tony Hawks Skateboarding, Soul Reaver 2 , and many others, all of which were very successful titles. I bought all these games on the strength of the demo. True, there were bad games there too, and on the strength of those same demo's I did not buy them.
And finally, video's only show how the game looks, and how it MAY play. Video's cannot tell prospective customers how responsive your control systems are, or how the game will feel, when played. I stopped buying games based on video's many years ago, because, in my experience, the game rarely played like it looked. You should check out Reddit, et al, for opinions on the recent next gen console reveals. Microsoft showed video's, crowd says "meh". Sony show demo's, the response was very different. One could make the argument that there will always be fanboys and haters, but these people are your customers, for better or worse. They can and will always have their own opinions. You can't change their minds with video's, which have no substance. Instead, use video's to incite interest in your demo, which will, in turn, incite interest in your full game. If it's good enough, it will succeed. If not, it will fail, simple as that.