Lack of demos boost piracy.

[sanquin]

--snip--

On #1: Please note that I specifically asked for demo's for those games in the post he replied to.

On #2: Once again, I'm not arguing for piracy. You can sum up a million reasons why piracy is bad, and why you should instead at least rent a game. But that wasn't my point at all. How is that so hard to understand?

 

[bug_of_war]

Demos aren't really that bad or good. Some of them just take a snippet of a level in the final game, others just go the Colonial Marines route and make an entire segment that is never found in game. In the end though you still get a basic feel for what the game is going to be, it may not be 100% exactly like the demo (A:CM) but I still knew what some of the gameplay would be like, and in the end it was enjoyable. Personally I don't download games because I generally know what I like and have yet to buy a game at full price that I didn't enjoy. There are of course going to be the odd games out (Duke Nukem Forever, Dead Space 2, Borderlands 1) that I have spent money on and regretted, but in total these 3 games have cost me less than 1 full game. I always find that if you're unsure about a game, wait till it is cheaper, or if you live in a country that allows you to rent games like Australia, UK, or US, go out and rent the game for a day, play as much as you can, and if you enjoyed it, buy it. The only reason I bought Assassins Creed: Brotherhood was because I was bored one night and decided to give it a go.

So yeah, I guess a lack of demos could potentially increase piracy/decrease piracy, but I feel that morally you should find alternative legal ways to play a game you are curious about.

 

[Woodsey]

I'm far less interested in demos than I am benchmark tools, and you're lucky if you get one of those attached to a demo itself, let alone given out separately.

 

[Total LOLige]

Are you this 'friend'?

I'd say pirating as a try before you buy is alright as long as you don't play longer than 30 minutes and delete it within 24 hours. what's the difference between that and listening to a song on the radio or youtube? Fuck all. I usually wait for reviews if it's a bad review then it's a no go unless there's a demo in which case I'll try it and go from there. A lack of demos probably does boost piracy, you used to be able to return a game if you thought it was shit but nowadays once the seal is broken it's no refundable in most cases(how it's been for me anyway, unless you make a big enough scene about it) that will increase piracy also. Demos probably have the potential to boost sales as well, you get trailers for every movie and previews for songs on itunes, even samples of books on amazon it wouldn't hurt games to do this more.

 

[CardinalPiggles]

Using the old try before you buy excuse only goes so far.

All games have some form of marketing. All games will get reviews. Most games will get "Let's play's" on YouTube. Most games can be rented (albeit at a slightly later date).

The only excuse I see to pirate a game would be to test it on your PC to make sure it runs properly, a problem I had when I first started gaming on the PC. Nothing tells me how high I can crank up each setting and how high my fps will be. I used to barely be able to tell what was going to run on my old PC at all. I tried looking at the obvious requirements, they were often vague. I tried some website that checked my PC to see if it will run, and it always looked vague. I tried comparing PC components by price because I had no idea what ATI cards compared to Nvidia cards or others and vice versa.

Anyway tangent aside, there are PLENTY of indicators as to whether or not you will like a game. People are just too lazy to look for them.

 

[xDarc]

Is it just me or do some of us not even bother to pirate games anymore? You can look at the top-seeded list of a tracker and read the titles and think to yourself, these games aren't even worth the space on my hard drive.

What I'm getting at is, if a game doesn't have a small demo that I can quickly grab and try out, I don't even bother getting it FOR FREE, let alone being bothered to do research on my time and then make decision as to whether or not to buy it.

It might be something I'll pick up for 5 dollars in a steam sale a couple years down the road.

But I'm 30 years old and I generally do not have time for game industry's bullshit. New IP? No Demo? Not interested. Not downloading. Sticking to buying the 3 games a year from brands/series I know and enjoy.

I've seriously got better shit to do than wonder whether or not I am missing out by not playing some video game I know nothing about. This is why the new PlayStation is tripping over itself to include all this sharing and social networking garbage. Sony doesn't sell games, People's friends, peer pressure, and the fear of being alienated from your group sells games... horrible, bland games, that I have largely ignored since the 360 first came out. It's been a down hill ride, and just at a point in my life where I am making 40K a year, have no children, can buy whatever I want... the industry keeps shitting in my mouth because they only want a fool's money and not mine.

Gaming machines may have moved out of Toys R Us and are now household items, but in the end they're still pandering to children for that allowance money with the kind of offensive, low-brow crap they constantly pull.

 

[DrNeroCF]

Demos make a whole lot of sense in PC gaming, when you could be entirely unsure how well something is going to run on your rig.

Also makes a ton of sense if you just want to download something new to see how it pushes your GPU. Pretty good way to grab a player if the game is good enough.

 

[NoeL]

--snip--

On #1: Please note that I specifically asked for demo's for those games in the post he replied to.

On #2: Once again, I'm not arguing for piracy. You can sum up a million reasons why piracy is bad, and why you should instead at least rent a game. But that wasn't my point at all. How is that so hard to understand?

#1: What you asked for was tangential and irrelevant. Baldr was arguing there are ways to try before you buy, and backed his point.

#2: The point you were trying to make (that not all games have free demos available) is painfully obvious, so making it in the first place is just plain dumb.


What you've done here is misunderstood someone's argument, made a trivial counter to that strawman, and then doubled down on your nonsense saying things like "But that wasn't my point at all. How is that so hard to understand?" when someone pointed out how your response misses the point of the argument you were supposed to be having. At this point you should just let it go.


OT: As Baldr pointed out there is often the ability to rent a game before resorting to piracy, but most people are so content with piracy they don't even bother to look for a rental. Also, sometimes publishers encode shitty DRM that makes it impossible to lease a game to many users, and (at least where I live) it's hard to find anywhere that leases PC games. You can rent console games from just about any video store, but not that many pirate console games in the first place (except on the Wii, given it's just so darned easy).

I think the lack of demos causing an increase in piracy is only half correct. In a lot of cases the people that turn to piracy because there's no demo are just being lazy, though this isn't always the case.

 

[BrotherRool]

If it's true then it causes a lot less people to pirate games than don't buy a game because of demos. They've done the numbers on this and it's pretty clear from the statistics that releasing a demo lowers the sales of a game.

It's an interesting idea, but the facts don't support it in this particular case

 

[GloatingSwine]

It's actually fairly well established that demos hurt sales.

Quite simply because it's really hard to make a good demo of a multi-hour product, so most demos are terrible, and a terrible demo means people don't buy the game, even if the demo is actually really unrepresentative of the game itself (plenty of good games have shit demos that really don't show off the best features of the game or make a good argument for buying it).

The start of the game is a bad representation of how it plays because it's generally fairly restrictive in terms of what the player can do and therefore isn't a good way to convince them they'll like the actual product, and cutting a chunk out of the middle misses out all the process of gradually introducing mechanics so players can feel lost and confused, so a good demo really needs to be constructed as its own product, and that means it takes development time and money away from the product it exists to sell.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

I think it was Extra Credits who talked about this, but I may be wrong. The reason demos stopped being made was basically that games and demos can be either good or bad. If the games and the demo are both bad then people will realize it thanks to the demo and sales are lost. If the demo is bad but the game is good, then then people will think it's bad before the release, but their opinion might change when it's released. Once again, lost sales. If the demo is good but the game is bad (Aliens, anyone?), then they do actually gain sales, but at the cost of bad rep. Finally, if the game and the demo are good, then the sales won't go up by that much, since the game would have sold anyway, and in some cases, people will play the demo, think it's great, but won't buy the game becuase that short experience was good enough for them.
So money is spent, but in most cases sales are lost.

Yeah, I was about to quote that episode too. Well explained - as sad as the lack of demos makes me, this explanation is really good and makes a lot of sense. Demos have a 75% chance to hurt sales.

It still sucks, and it still is probably a cause for piracy, but... yeah.

 

[lacktheknack]

It's actually fairly well established that demos hurt sales.

Quite simply because it's really hard to make a good demo of a multi-hour product, so most demos are terrible, and a terrible demo means people don't buy the game, even if the demo is actually really unrepresentative of the game itself (plenty of good games have shit demos that really don't show off the best features of the game or make a good argument for buying it).

The start of the game is a bad representation of how it plays because it's generally fairly restrictive in terms of what the player can do and therefore isn't a good way to convince them they'll like the actual product, and cutting a chunk out of the middle misses out all the process of gradually introducing mechanics so players can feel lost and confused, so a good demo really needs to be constructed as its own product, and that means it takes development time and money away from the product it exists to sell.

Then quite frankly, they should cut a couple million dollars out of their insane marketing budgets and do what Just Cause 2 did.

I bought Just Cause 2 entirely because of the demo, no more and no less. (Yes, I did play the original, but no, I wasn't that impressed with it.)

 

[GloatingSwine]

Then quite frankly, they should cut a couple million dollars out of their insane marketing budgets and do what Just Cause 2 did.

I bought Just Cause 2 entirely because of the demo, no more and no less. (Yes, I did play the original, but no, I wasn't that impressed with it.)

Ironically, I didn't buy Just Cause 1 because I played the demo (specifically, the main dude's run animation made him look like he was desperately trying to hold in a bout of the shits and I wasn't going to play a game where I had to watch that for fifty hours).

 

[mokes310]

There are numerous places that you can rent and demo games in the United States either freely or a couple dollars. This "no demo" is just a horrible excuse to pirate games, it not even justified because they are wrong.

He isn't advocating for piracy, imo. He's saying that no demo's increase piracy. Which is true. It being a good excuse or not, not having demo's still increases piracy. Though I think a lot of those that pirate, wouldn't have bought the game anyway if they had played a demo first.

GameSpot, GameZone, Steam and OnLive all have free demos and free registration. Redbox, GameFly, Blockbuster Online, Blockbuster "Blue" Box all have extremely cheap game rentals. Plus the hundreds of non-chain rental places in the US. Not finding a "Demo" for game is extremely rare.

Here's the problem...not everyone lives in the US, nor does everyone have a computer capable of handling the higher-end games.

I'm in Korea, and I have literally zero access to demos unless XBOX Live puts them out (which is hardly ever). I can't download games on Steam because they are region/content locked/blocked. My only access to new media that I want to try is through torrents. If I like it, I buy it. If I didn't, I wont. And guess what? I'm not too keen on keeping a game that I didn't like. I'm also guessing that not many people who don't like a game that they've torrented are keeping those games either...

 

[lacktheknack]

Then quite frankly, they should cut a couple million dollars out of their insane marketing budgets and do what Just Cause 2 did.

I bought Just Cause 2 entirely because of the demo, no more and no less. (Yes, I did play the original, but no, I wasn't that impressed with it.)

Ironically, I didn't buy Just Cause 1 because I played the demo (specifically, the main dude's run animation made him look like he was desperately trying to hold in a bout of the shits and I wasn't going to play a game where I had to watch that for fifty hours).

Well, they fixed it.

But come on, that's just PETTY.

 

[Tiamattt]

It's kinda a lose-lose for the developer then. If they make the demos then they have a huge chance of losing money. But if they don't make the demo then the people that wanted the demo instead might pirate the game. So what we need here is some research to see

1. How many people don't buy the game due to lack of demos
1. How many people that pirate the game due to lack of the demo and not just because it's free
2. How many of those people end up buying it after they "had their demo."

If the answer to those questions are high enough then the developers might be more willing to risk making the demos because the extra sales might be worth the risk. Although considering how high that risk is, the answer to those 3 questions would have to be pretty big, to say the very least.

 

[xDarc]

#2: The point you were trying to make (that not all games have free demos available) is painfully obvious, so making it in the first place is just plain dumb.

...

OT: As Baldr pointed out there is often the ability to rent a game before resorting to piracy, but most people are so content with piracy they don't even bother to look for a rental.

Isn't it dumb to even mention rentals in the context of piracy?

Who's pirating games that they have the ability to rent?

People with software/hardware mods to their consoles that they can't even go online with, that they specifically modified to play pirated software on in the first place? These people don't bother to look for a rental because they have a box dedicated to piracy. These aren't people who pirate due to a lack of a demo. These are straight up pirates running hacked boxes.

I mean, you can't rent PC games, and most of the casual pirates are on PC, so why even bring rentals up? It's ridiculous.

 

[Baldr]

http://www.gamefly.com/rent-games/Search/?kw=Skyrim&sec=GameFly&doSearch=
http://www.redbox.com/search/?q=Skyrim&d=
http://www.gamefly.com/rent-games/Search/?kw=Call+of+Duty&sec=GameFly&doSearch=
http://www.redbox.com/search/?q=Call%20of%20Duty&d=
http://www.gamefly.com/rent-games/Search/?kw=Grand+Theft+Auto+IV&sec=GameFly&doSearch=
http://www.redbox.com/search/?q=Grand%20Theft%20Auto%20IV&d=
http://www.gamefly.com/rent-games/Search/?kw=Borderland+2&sec=GameFly&doSearch=
http://www.redbox.com/search/?q=Borderland%202&d=

And for the rest of you, I qualified the United States in my post, because I know it is not an option for the rest of the world.

Those are rentals, not demo's. People want to be able to try out a game without having to pay money for it first. You know, in case the money spent is a total waste. Which happens all too often these days.

And also once again, I'm not justifying piracy. I don't think this is not a good excuse for piracy. But it does make a lot of people more likely to pirate.

$2, if your can't afford $2 for a rental than you shouldn't be buying a game. Look at the OP post, he saying they do have money, it still a better option.

 

[VladG]

There are numerous places that you can rent and demo games in the United States either freely or a couple dollars. This "no demo" is just a horrible excuse to pirate games, it not even justified because they are wrong.

He isn't advocating for piracy, imo. He's saying that no demo's increase piracy. Which is true. It being a good excuse or not, not having demo's still increases piracy. Though I think a lot of those that pirate, wouldn't have bought the game anyway if they had played a demo first.

GameSpot, GameZone, Steam and OnLive all have free demos and free registration. Redbox, GameFly, Blockbuster Online, Blockbuster "Blue" Box all have extremely cheap game rentals. Plus the hundreds of non-chain rental places in the US. Not finding a "Demo" for game is extremely rare.

Uh-huh. Totally agree with you. Except you might be forgetting a small little detail. Not everyone lives in the US (shocking, I know).

 

[Baldr]

There are numerous places that you can rent and demo games in the United States either freely or a couple dollars. This "no demo" is just a horrible excuse to pirate games, it not even justified because they are wrong.

He isn't advocating for piracy, imo. He's saying that no demo's increase piracy. Which is true. It being a good excuse or not, not having demo's still increases piracy. Though I think a lot of those that pirate, wouldn't have bought the game anyway if they had played a demo first.

GameSpot, GameZone, Steam and OnLive all have free demos and free registration. Redbox, GameFly, Blockbuster Online, Blockbuster "Blue" Box all have extremely cheap game rentals. Plus the hundreds of non-chain rental places in the US. Not finding a "Demo" for game is extremely rare.

Uh-huh. Totally agree with you. Except you might be forgetting a small little detail. Not everyone lives in the US (shocking, I know).

I've posted twice on this thread that this was for the US only. You people to need to learn to read.