Game trailers and game demos are probably two of the best weapons in a game publisher's arsenal for marketing a product and generating significant pre-release buzz. Trailers are a win-win, but demos can be a little more tricky. On the one hand, nothing can do a better job of selling your game than letting players actually experience the title for a period of time. On the other hand, if a demo is too bulky and offers a great self-contained game experience, players might feel like they've gotten enough of the product to justify not purchasing the full release.
Some publishers have tried to mitigate this by making demos timed, so the player has to exit after X minutes go by, and others have simply pared down the available features in the game. A new Sony patent, uncovered by Siliconera, would appear to address demos another way: by making them "degradable."
Sword shrinkage... a horrible image for men
How does it work? Essentially, Sony would offer players a basically complete, feature-packed version of the full game, but the features would slowly be removed until the user actually decides to buy the full title. The demo would disable features after a set number of plays or lapsed play time. One scenario outlined, for example, is a weapon can be weakened or replaced with a less powerful one after a number of hours go by in the demo. Other possible ideas include removing levels or subtler things like softening sound effects, changing color depth, and brightness.
So basically, gamers would get to experience the full game for a limited period of time, and then to erase the "degradable" aspect they simply can unlock the full game by purchasing. What do you think? A good idea, or too irritating?
6 Comments
March 5, 2010
That seems like it might backfire. Players checking out the demo might get the wrong idea that the game is overly difficult, and decide to skip it. If the idea behind this is the fear that the player will get enough of a game experience from playing a short demo, then perhaps the full game doesn't offer enough of a incentive.
March 5, 2010
idk about this, great in theory, but how long before somone figures out how to just keep the game in whole.
March 5, 2010
Let me get this straight, the tactic is to give you a slice of the full game outright then chip away at it by making ir harder, smaller, less feature rich and uglier? The idea being that you'll think, "Well shit, I liked it a lot more before, I better buy it so it's easy/big/prettier again"??
What sort of marketing genius came up with that?
How about this (an adventure game example)... pick a point in the progression of the game (in terms of loadout, setting, everything) that you want to highlight, create a unique portion of the stage that the player can play all the way through in the demo. Then, you can embed that "demo stage" within the actual stage in the final game. If the player played through the demo and then purchased the game they have the choice to skip past it, if not (if they just purchased it without the demo) then they have to play through it. It ought to be pretty awesome anyway since you created it specifically for the teasing demo so you won't be wasting development time or money or pissing off the people who bought the game ouright with junk...
Any developers who use this idea can contact me for my address so they can mail me my royalties check.. I won't be holding my breath for a check from Activision.
March 5, 2010
Interesting...
From the publisher POV, a degradable demo would end up on limiting the user`s experience, thus wanting more (if the game is good) and forcing them to purchase the full retail version of the game. Just like a demo would be useful to.
From the consumer POV, I`m worried. First, there`s nothing worse than a low-quality demo. It just ruins the whole game proposal to me and with it, my intention to actually buy it.
Second, timed demos are not that bad. I`m actually left wanting more. Think of the best rated (within the XBOXLIVE platform) game demo ever released: Bioshock. it offered a great tease of the idea of the whole game. And it wasn`t even timed. It was portion-limited.
Third, will degradable game demos will go the first or second way I just explained?
A possibility is that only hardcore gamers will unlock the full game, since the casual gamers had just played the "whole game" in the first minutes...
There copul be other possibilities, but not that optimistic in terms of converting trialists to buyers...
March 5, 2010
I love game demos. They have helped with several purchases of mine. I'm not sure this move is the right one to make but I suppose they need to try something to entice more players to step up to the full game.
March 7, 2010
Great Idea Sony, at first glance it sucks for me. But then again maybe it will FORCE me to stop playing a demo, and find out the game is even better than I thought, a classic. For instance I could see someone playing a great Gran turismo demo for hours, and NEVER figuring out how good it is until they play from the begging to end. It kinda has a car rpg build up theme to it. Can you imagine a person never having played Gran turismo or forza because the demo let them keep playing, and they never went to find out how deep the games are? I mean you can draw your high school with your own style with Forza or go from a junker in gran turismo to a super exotic powerhouse machine. But no matter how much the demo tells you that, you have to find out yourself.