Why does it seem like less PC game publishers are releasing demos?

Cafe Society
1

I can’t imagine why Rockstar or whoever publishes GTA: Vice City wouldn’t put out a demo. Most of the big gaming stores like EB have become much more strict with their return policy so buying a game without trying it first has become significantly less tenable. It used to be that almost every game put out a demo, now I only find it as a pleasant surprise. Isn’t it a no-brainer to release a demo?

2

GTA: VC is a port of a Playstation 2 games, which of course does not have a demo. I suspect most console ports don’t have demos available. Why bother? In most cases you’re catering to people who have seen the original on the console.

Plus, in the instance of GTA:VC, you’re all but guranteed to have monster sales. Why divert resources into making a demo if it isn’t going to boost your sales in any material fashion?

Has there really been a slowdown in non-port PC game demos? I can only think of a few examples of big-hype games with no demos – Morrowind, The Sims, Neverwinter Nights are a few. Part of that is the open-ended nature of those games – it’s hard to come up with a logical stopping point for the demo, and I’d imagine it would take more changes to the core program in order to make it so. Compare to FPS and RTS games, where the game is typically divided up into levels – thus making it easy to throw the first couple of levels together as a demo.

3

I think there was a slowdown in non-port PC demos until just recently (Last 4 months). As far as Vice City - you’d think the PC version market would be geared to people who don’t have a ps2. I for one think a demo WOULD boost sales in a material fashion - I’m sure there are other people like me out there who like to try a game out before buying it. I’m not a programmer but I can’t demos are that much work and even if they are I can’t imagine it not paying off.

4

Maybe cause if the demo crashes on someone’s machine, you probably just lost a sale. Also, a lot of PC games don’t quite live up to their concept, and that’s not something you want your customers to know.

5

Plus the games have gotten so damn big they’ve become impractical to download over a dial-up connection. The demo for Age of Mythology was around 60MB!