Are game demos still a thing? (Monkey Island content)

The Game Room
1

I’m not much of a gamer these days, but both Mrs Snowman and I are quite excited by the new Monkey Island game - we both loved the 90s point-and-clicks.

Neither of us have any sort of gaming rig - I have a 2014 Mac Mini (still going strong) and she has a Windows laptop. I’m not sure of the specs, but it’s definitely not built for gaming and in particular has integrated graphics, as does the Mac.

I expect neither of us will be able to run it, but in circumstances like these in the past I’d have downloaded the demo and tried it. Looking at both the official website and the Steam store page, I can’t see any mention of a demo, so I was wondering if this was something that had gone out of fashion while I wasn’t looking?

So really, my question is two-fold: is there a demo for the new Monkey Island game that I’ve missed, and if not is this now the norm?

2

Demos are far and few between, now they offer up videos of gameplay mostly from what I’ve seen.

I’m a Windows guy, so don’t know the Mac hardware, but here are the requirements:

MINIMUM:

  • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
  • OS: MacOS High Sierra and above
  • Processor: AMD FX-4300 (4 * 3800) or equivalent / Intel Core i3-3240 (2 * 3400) or equivalent
  • Memory: 8 GB RAM
  • Graphics: Radeon HD 7750 (1024 VRAM) or equivalent / GeForce GT 640 (2048 VRAM) or equivalent
  • Storage: 4 GB available space

RECOMMENDED:

  • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
  • OS: Big Sur
3

With Steam, if you buy a game and then discover it doesn’t work on your machine, you can get a refund if you return it quickly (something like within a day). So in a sense, now everything has a demo.

4

Steam refunds are 2 hours of playtime over 14 days. Enough for a performance test for sure, but you need to watch the clock.

5

Thanks all. That makes a lot of sense - rather than a demo, just offer a time-limited refund.

6

Games still have demos but the ratio of games with demos to those without makes them hard to find. Steam has been having events where they showcase a bunch of demos – and the next is tomorrow (October 3rd). But, even if they have hundreds of demos showcased, that’s still a drop in the bucket against the tens of thousands of game without demos so the impression that demos are a thing of the past is legitimate.

7

One reason why official demos are scarce is because there is a glut of free games with micro transactions. Some of those games hide a great amount of content and features behind DLCs and such. They are basically demos in all but name. Sims 4 is an example; you can usually pick it up for free (EA keeps giving it away) but they put most of the cool stuff behind a paywall.

So, in effect we have many demos still, they just hide what they are.