The Importance of the Demo
(02/07/2011) The videogame demo is a useful way of gauging whether or not I want to buy a game. Better than staring at a game’s inevitable 80-something Metacritic score, a good demo gives the player a taste of the game, lets them find out for themselves if the game suits their individual tastes.
I’ve been surprised by some great demos (I’d probably never have bought the rather excellent Bulletstorm if I hadn’t enjoyed the demo so much) and I’ve likely also been put off some pretty good games by a bad demo (I liked everything I saw about Dragon Age II up until I played the demo, at which point the gameplay came across as a stiff clunky mess. This killed dead my desire to play any more of that game.)
But when it comes to PC games, a demo is vital, for the simple reason that I’ve no idea whether my PC will play the game or not, and I’m sure as hell not paying for a game that I’m not 100% certain will run to a reasonable degree on my machine.
The minimum/recommended specs are all well and good, but everyone knows these offer no real indication of how well the game is going to run, or if it even will at all. You can specify your hardware details as much as you like, but every graphics card is unique, each with their own little quibbles and disagreements with every other part of your PC, and their behaving as intended is far from guaranteed. Many times have I fallen foul of a game of such specification that my PC should have played it with relish, only to be met with an inexplicable error message that takes hours worth of internet trawling and software updates to sort out.
The only way to test if a game will run to the standards I require is to download a demo. It should be compulsory for PC developers to release a demo. How else am I supposed to make a purchasing decision? I’d love to test if The Witcher 2 would work on my machine (and indeed if I’d actually enjoy the game), but there’s no demo out, and it doesn’t seem like there will be in the near future. Know what I’m going to do? I’ll wait for the Xbox version instead.
I understand that it takes additional resources for a developer to release a demo, but the fact of the matter is, if I can’t test your game, there’s no way in hell I’m going to buy it. I can’t be alone in this, I’m sure. I’m way past the point where I have the patience to download a pirate copy, go through all the software patches and registry fiddling involved with making it work, just to see if I can run the damn thing or not.
One of the reasons I’m far more inclined to play games on a console rather than my PC is the specification lottery. The one thing that puts my mind at rest, and makes comfortable in paying out for a PC game, is a solid demo. Developers, take note. If you want to sell more PC games, then a demo is an absolute requirement.
