> For instance, I think this game looks great. But I'm not sure it looks great enough to throw money at it, I won't know that until I try it.
Yes. And you buy it if there's no demo. When I was a kid and played Atari, NES, Genesis, there were no demos. Sometimes everything you could see was only an art on the game cartridge. I personally didn't buy many games since I played demos of them. And I can't recall any game I wouldn't buy if there wasn't a demo.
Yeah, I remember those days. It was really a gamble and we didn't have much money so we didn't buy games, we rented them from a video store.
I can think of several games personally. Rogue Legacy didn't sound like my type of gam at all, but I grabbed a demo and fell in love. Even bought copies for my friends. Undertale was another, long before the Kickstarter I had heard about this little game but it didn't look very good to me, but he had a small demo available and I fell in love again. As soon as that came out I bought two copies. Some more recent ones are Nine Parchments and Dragon Quest Builders on Switch, a demo for Nine Parchments came out and I played that with some friends and decided that was actually a lot of fun and bought that too. And DQ Builders, I thought it looked a bit boring and almost passed it by completely, but it had a demo release before the game came out. Ended up preordering it and spending like 200 hours on it.
I don't have a great deal of free time, and not a tonne of disposal cash so I can't afford to buy every game that "looks good".
Breath of the Wild is one of the best games ever made, but I think it would demo poorly, and would've lost a lot of sales if they'd given a demo. Sales from people that would've absolutely loved the game if they'd bought it. That's a real shame for the developers and the players!
Breath of the Wild isn't a great example, Zelda sells because it's Zelda!
The other problem with demos is that people that play them will often go "yeah, I'll get this sometime," when if you didn't have a demo, they would've just purchased. If someone is lazily shopping the eShop at night with $10 to spend, and they see your game with a demo and another game that interests them a bit less than yours with no demo, they're going to download your demo and then buy the other game so they can try that one, too. Then they're going to forget about your game after it gets buried by new releases a week later. I think demos almost always lose mountains of sales nowadays, and it's not because of the quality of the games being demoed.
I don't think that's completely accurate. I personally feel like the demo will give the person more cause to buy your game in that scenario, especially if they were already slightly more interested in it.
I think a trailer will show the essence of my thirty hour long game way better than any half hour long demo would, for example - you can't show what makes an RPG great in half an hour.
That's mostly true and I partly agree. In the sense that you might not be able to understand the full scope or tone or setting as well in a small demo. But, for some people(like me), getting a feel for game mechanics like the battle system is very very important.
My main point is that demos can be a useful tool, you have a wide range of potential customers and some of them would benefit from a demo.
Anyway, for something a little more on topic, I kept forgetting to ask about the ping pong gif, are there many more mini games like that? That looks like a lot of fun...