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Demo decrease in the past few years

Schadenfroh

Schadenfroh

Elite Member
i have noticed a bad trend in the game industry the past few years, and i was wondering if any 1 else has noticed it also. fewer and fewer games have demos now. A few years ago almost every game had a demo. If you are going to pay 50 bucks for a game, shouldnt you be able to play a small portion of it to see if you like it? I know that they dont "make" money off of demos, but i am afraid to purchase games anymore out of fear i am waisting money. Too me that is actaully hurting game sales. i know some stores offer that comeback and trade it in if you dont like it but that is too much hassle. I wish more game developers would start writing demos for their games, for the sake of the consumer.
 
What do you mean? All the popular games seem to have demos. In fact, some demo's are so good that I don't really want to buy the game (like the UT and UT2k3 demos).
 
I haven't noticed a lack of demos at all. Some games have awesome movies as well as playable demos.
If anything, I would say that there are more demos than in the past.
 
Hmm. kind of. I buy games based on demos I like, and since I'm stuck on dial up, that means magazine cover disks. It seems for a while now that they've been putting less game demos on and more game videos instead (I really couldn't care less about game videos - if they were that good they'd be releasing the damn things at the cinema - its the gameplay I care about)

At first I thought this was just because demo sizes got bigger and CD size was only 650 mb, but even with DVD coverdisks you only get a couple extra. Is it just that games take a lot more effort to make now, and so less come out, and more rarely?

I'm sure that there have been some games recently that came out without demos, but I can't think of any.
Did Unreal 2 have a demo?
 
Yes, Unreal 2 had a demo, as did UT2k3, Splinter Cell, NOLF2...

Just gotta go out and hunt them down. Even if you're on dial-up, download them overnight.

I have a friend on dial-up that I actually had to upgrade his 14GB HDD to 100GB! Most amazing thing I've ever seen! (How the hell do you download 14GB at 56K?!?!)
 
(How the hell do you download 14GB at 56K?!?!)
Click to expand...
With an abundance of patients...
When I had 56K I upgraded to a brand spankin new 80GB drive to hold all that stuff. Now, between my main rig and my file server, I have about 650GB of storage. And DSL 😉

\Dan
 
the top games have demos, but it IS harder to find demos for the more obscure ones.
Hearts of Iron is an example 🙂
 
I'm not sure if it's that true, but I also have noticed the lack of demos. The main problem I notice though is when they come. They used to come at least a few weeks before the game, and now it's at the same time. I think they should release demos more like a beta before the game is out, not a small bit of the already made thing. You kind of miss out on the fun of the "newest thing" if you wait for demos now.
 
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