Eternal_Lament said:
Plus, since there's the chance that the demo could be only okay or bad, it's often better for a game that's already poised to earn money to just spend the time and resources into polishing the game rather than releasing something that could hurt sales. Also, an okay demo for a terrible game doesn't actually help too often, since even if the demo is serviceable the player may opt to wait for reviews to come out, and when they do it usually leaves the player disinterested or feel that they got the most they could get with the demo. The same problem applies to the okay/okay situation, in which a player is either going to get it regardless or they'll just wait for reviews.
weirdguy said:
the question is with "awesome game awesome demo" is that is it worth it to do the extra work for a demo compared to how many less sales a game will get if that game is good enough to become popular on its own? the only game i can come up with that worked like that is minecraft, and i'm still not really sure why it continues to sell even though you would think that by now it would have reached some sort of saturation point, even before the game became "officially a complete game".
Well, I suppose there are really two kinds of demos. The "release this way before the actual game" demos and the "here's a sample of what our full game will offer you" demos. I'll agree that the former are more of a risk and more work to put together, but the latter are much safer and shouldn't be a whole lot of extra work. Note that the latter also serve pretty well as a "will this run on my machine" demo. That's not so big a deal on consoles, but it's much more important on PC. All other things being equal, a gamer certain that the game will run is a gamer more likely to buy the game.
Monsterfurby said:
The_Great_Galendo said:
I'm pretty certain that adding a demo only hurts your game if your game sucks.
More importantly: if your DEMO sucks.
You CAN make a great demo for a crappy game, and vice versa. If you release a demo, do so in a smart manner.
I stand corrected; you're right on both points, of course.
Bad Jim said:
1) They've got empirical data. You can spout theory all you like, but the real world data says otherwise.
No, no, no, no, no! Repeat after me: correlation does not imply causation. Correlation does not imply causation. Correlation does not imply causation.
Maybe indie games with smaller budgets are both more likely to have demos released (because they can't afford a large ad campain, e.g.) and less likely to have massive sales numbers (because it's a previously unheard-of indie game). In this example, it's not that one causes the other; it's that both are affected by the budget size. Unless their data accounts for factors such as this (and, given that available development resources are not always public information, I rather doubt it does), their empirical data is of limited value at best. And even if it did, that
still wouldn't be enough to show causation. Unless they're running double-blind studies with game releases to gather this empirical data, that conclusion does not necessarily follow from their data. It might, of course -- but then again, it might not.
