We all love game demos don't we? They're a chance for everybody to play a chunk of a game for free before we commit to a purchase. A chance for us to make sure our hard earned cash is spent on a good product rather than a shoddy one.
Sadly, demos aren't the most common things nowadays and a lot of games go straight to market with no way of us testing them out beforehand. But is there a reason for it? I believe there is.
For starters, we need to understand that demos cost money to produce, regardless of how simple they are. Because of this, companies need to have a lot of faith that their demo is good enough to boost sales to the point of making that money back. This shouldn't be a problem if a game is good, right? Well...not exactly.
A demo can be bad, regardless of how good a game is. Need an example? Spec Ops: The Line. The demo for this game was...mediocre at best, it was simply a snippet of what seemed like a boring modern military third-person shooter with nothing even remotely impressive about it. Eventually though, I picked up the game in a sale and it blew me away, the game has an astonishing story that wasn't put across well at all in the demo and I almost missed out on the whole experience just because I actually tried said demo.
What I'm trying to say here is that a demo is not representative of the final product and overall it is more likely that demos will have a negative impact on development studios that release them. A fantastic game with a mediocre demo is probably going to have lower sales figures because people have played that demo and assumed that it's what the final game would be like; this would lead to the studio spending money to...make less money than they would otherwise. This, my friends, is why we don't see as many demos as you would expect; they're simply too much of a risk for a lot of studios.
So really, any studio that does provide demos should really be commended for even taking the risk of making one; they're putting a lot of trust into their product. Just something to think about.
As always, thank you for reading.
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