How do you get an informed glimpse of whether or not you’ll like Gigli at the theater? From the trailer? Doesn’t everyone bitch that don’t buy full CDs because only the singles aren’t representative of the final product? And aren’t book excerpts fairly rare, and only occur for a tiny handfull of books? (Unless I’m reading the wrong magazines.)
Anyway, I actually agree that demos are great and wonderful, but I think they tell you a lot more about the final product than most “demos” for other forms of entertainment. And again, I was joking about dumping them.
As for games generally “working”, well, kinda, yeah, but just because you can get a game to run doesn’t mean it isn’t a buggy mess. There are far more of those “buggy, but technically playable” games out there than ones which just flat out won’t work.
That gets into the buggy games discussion, and a demo won’t necessarily protect or inform you against this problem.
Blizzard games among others rarely have demos before they are sold in stores.
I really don’t understand the fuss. If there’s no demo or if the demo is distributed through some specific outlet and you can’t get it for some reason and you’re unsure about the game, just don’t buy it. Wait for the price to drop and buy it cheap to avoid the feeling of getting burned.
Steve’s point is a good one. You can’t tell if a movie is good by a preview. You get what…30-60 seconds of a two hour film? How is that representative of the final product? You might say “reviews can prove whether or not I should go see it” but then we can say the same about games…wait for the reviews and use those as a guide.
Bah…too many words expended over bitching about something that’s given away for free.
Maybe it’s just me, but given how much I enjoyed NOLF 1 and NOLF 2, I don’t think I’m going to require a demo for the third one in the series. I mean it’d be nice to play around with and take a look at but reading comments like Fussbett or Bleeding Edge, make me wonder if they played the same games I did.
You’re not gonna buy it because the demo is only on Fileplanet? I’m going to guess you weren’t going to buy it in the first place. Invoking the words, “Nazi China” in comparision to an exclusive demo leads me to believe that you must have some other exclusivity-related issues.
Almost every game from Blizzard and Westwood didn’t have a demo until it had been on shelves for a while.[/quote]
Those companies don’t exacly need demos since their games are as close to garunteed best sellers. So maybe technically a few games have them later one the SIms never did. The general point which anybody reading my post can see is general public demos do get released on a regualr basis, and the occasional FilePlanet limited test demos that people then bitch about is nothing more than that just something to bitch about.
I can tell whether I’ll enjoy watching the movie from the normal 60 second trailer.
Really? I can imagine that you can tell if it is a film you will potentially enjoy but how does a 60 second trailer actually tell you if the film is good?
Game previews serve the same purpose as a movie trailer- they can tell you that you may potentially enjoy a game.
Shrug, I don’t like 90% of the movies that come out. I can tell whether I will enjoy the movie from the trailer about 99% of the time (and I’ve never seen a movie in the theater I didn’t like).
My experiences are quite the opposite. In my opinion, there are plenty of crappy movies that have thrilling trailers. This seems to translate to the PC world pretty well too.
While I’d hardly call an exclusive release to FilePlanet a small release, the problem I initially raised was the demo’s complex authentication and registration scheme. It strikes me as a hinderance to players with a real interest in the game and flies in the face of ultimate purpose of demos: marketing the game. Is having GameSpy promote the demo in such a manner worth the offsetting cost of putting up so many roadblocks, turning away potential customers?
I find the idea of exclusive demos pretty objectionable, it’s just FilePlanet trying to whore up some cash when we’d all be better off when it’s done for free, with numerous sites and isp based ftp’s willing to do so, without a pointless wait so FP can make some cash out of thin air.
A lot of you guys seem pretty damn caught-up on the gamers dreaded sense of entitlement too. Demos are a good thing, the more common they are the better off we are. It doesn’t effect the company unless they have a real stinker on their hands. Seems like a win-win situation to me. For games you’re edging on demos are espescially useful.
