Study Recommends Releasing Trailers Over Demos

I totally believe this, as most games are crappy, and therefore, on average, releasing a demo is just going to damage a crappy game.

When a game is good however, a good demo makes me much more likely to buy it. Most recently: Devil May Cry 4, Dead Rising, Burnout Paradise. They are all games I had zero interest in until I played the demos. (It's.. interesting to note, that all these demos share time constraints in common.. hrrrrm...)

it's obvious that this indicates that trailers are well made if they create an overly positive impression, demos are the real deal and you can't hide behind cuts and music and edits in the real deal.

This is interesting I guess. But yeah...it's hard to make a cause-effect analysis of this. It'd be interesting to see what actual games were.

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Causation implied by statisticians while ignoring the bigger and more complex reality, Film at 11.

Hidden & Dangerous 2, Hearts of Iron 2, MoH: Airborne, I all purchased because I loved the demos to death (well, I was intrigued by HoI2 and its low ass pricetag) and played them constantly until the full game arrived....
But otherwise, just playing a game for half an hour at a friends house and enjoying it has sometimes even convinced me to buy a console, let alone a single game.

But the study doesn't test causation... which is the critical question. It could just be that more successful games, or better developed games, tend to release trailers rather than demos. Or that borderline games tend to drum up support through demos, and tested franchises don't need to. But that doesn't provide any useful conclusions about how to promote future games.

Want to know why? People buy games they'd otherwise hate because the trailer made it look good. With demos you cannot lie, the players sees exactly what they'll get.

From the point of view of a developer, demos suck to make.

Why? Because the game isn't finished, but they're pressed to make one PART of it finished.

This usually conflicts with the most logical order of doing things and causes wasted time. I wouldn't be too surprised if the lack of demos is a reflection of better management and production planning (which translates into better games.)


That said, demos will not go away any time soon - press demos if nothing more. And aside from demos, a lot of development is about milestones and "vertical slices" which is similar to making a demo (don't concentrate on the end product, just focus on this one spot) - if you plan right for it it's feasible - and they do try to schedule these things as completely as possible...

But personally, I think they have enough difficultly planning game production in the first place, without demos and surprise deliveries to complicate it.

I never would have bought AudioSurf without a demo. Some things just need to let players try it out.

grrr wasnt ready to post. So yea, crappy games with crappy demos dont sell well. SHOCKING. Trailers can make the worst products look good. So the article should be titled 'How to swindle your primary base by giving them lots of shinny things'

Buuuullllllllllllllllllllllllllsheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet

In other news a study conducted by people with more money than you proved that that need more of your money. more to follow, please stand by!

the subtitle for this study is "How trailers allow you to get away with darn near anything."

I don't think I've ever bought a game because I liked the demo. Not once.

I've played hundreds of demos and it's not to say I don't like them. They usually confirm my suspicions and in days of old when they came out before the game, they let me try it before I was going to buy it anyways.

I'm sure lots of people here played Quake test when they knew they were going to buy it anyways, didn't matter. Same thing with EQ, I just knew I was going to buy it, didn't care for a trial or demo.

This is not surprising at all.

The majority of games out there are not very good, so it would make sense that you don't want people to play it until they have already given away their money.

This article is garbage. You need to compare apples to apples. These charts represent all games from shovel ware, to big budget crappy games, 7/10 medium budget games, AAA games that are sequels and don't need a demo, etc

I don't really think this is entirely fair either, because some really big-budget games don't have a demo because they don't need one (Halo 3 at launch, etc), and other smaller games DO need a demo, and still might not sell well.

This means it is rational for companies to be evil and not give consumers demos. :/

"The findings of the study are consistent across both platforms with one exception: games without trailers or demos available sold better on PlayStation 3 than Xbox 360, indicating that games on Microsoft's console are better off with some sort of promotional material on Xbox Live."

Or that 360's owners are significantly less dumb than PS3 owners. (Or maybe just hard up for good games).

But seriously... good games will benefit from demos... and bad games wont. It's pretty simple. Bioshock had an amazing demo... people went nuts over that demo because it rocked. In that case I think the demo sold the game (it worked on me for sure).

Is there a link somewhere to the actual presentation? This data is ambiguous; does it include all titles including XBLA games? Can we break it down by game review score?