Rock Paper Shotgun are calling it “The Death of the Demo.” Could it be so?
Newsy sources report that e-Distributor Direct2Drive are offering a new game rental service. Five dollars gets you five hours with a game… one that’s conveniently fully downloaded Directly 2 your Drive, as it were, should you decide to pony up full price after your time’s up.
Good idea? Bad idea?
I honestly don’t know. Like RPS I think $5 is a little high. I think hard drives are a little space-tight. And, frankly, I don’t like Direct2Drive, an opinion I share with many people. It’s invasive, spyware laden, has poor support, and doesn’t integrate as cleanly with my life as Steam does.
Demos are tricky business. They cost money and take time to create; time developers often claim would be better spent in pure development. At the same time, though, a demo can make or break a game, and many thrifty shoppers won’t buy without a demo. It’s not an unreasonable request.
If you want to look at extremes, the demo for Crackdown probably singlehandedly sold a million units. It was the perfect demo. Ironically enough, Crackdown’s creator Realtime Worlds later sealed its own doom with another demo (well, technically an open beta, but hey): releasing APB about a week before launch allowed the entire world to see how catastrophically troubled the game was, and it imploded faster than any MMO in history, taking Realtime Worlds with it.
At Blockbuster it costs about $5 – maybe $7 – to rent a game for seven days. Their pricing model makes a little more sense because a motivated player can finish many games in seven days, saving themselves the cost of the game. Five dollars for five hours is dicier. I assume the clock is only ticking when you’re actually playing the game (if you get a flat five hours that starts the minute you boot it up this scheme is doomed), and being able to spend five hours evaluating a “maybe” seems pretty sweet.
Questions, though: if you elect to buy a game you just rented, can you simply unlock it with a keystroke? Do your saves carry over? Or do you have to start again? And how secure is this system? Hackers have demonstrated time and again that nothing is secure, so it seems to me that the only way to ensure that rentals aren’t cracked is some sort of hideous DRM maneuver that inserts a pineapple-sized camera directly into the rectum of the renter. That won’t fly either.
All that said, it seems a logical future. EA and others have already announced plans to charge for “extended demos,” which offer like four or five hours of play and cost as much as ten bucks. And if Direct2Drive’s plan works, you can be sure that Steam and Impulse will soon follow. On one hand I like the idea a lot, especially since plenty of games I want to try never get demos. On the other hand, it’s… it’s weird.
Discuss!
I don’t mind it. It’s what OnLive has been doing since the service opened, and I don’t mind paying 5 bucks to get halfway through a game, and 5 more to get the other half. So as long as savegames commute, that’s ok with me.
The Blockbuster analogy doesn’t work so well because you’ll never find a store that will rent PC games.
Yeah, no, five dollars is really quite expensive, considering you buy whole games for that money over on Steam. Also five hours sounds great in theory, it should give you a great opportunity to assess the game and decide whether to buy it, but I can’t help but think that it will push a lot of people away too. Many games I have played for five hours that I have never come back to because they haven’t enchanted me. Which is great for them (again in theory) because at least they get five bucks out of a non-buyer but after a few burns I think I’d just stop giving them five bucks for stuff I never buy when normal demoes did it for me for free.
Also, you can’t mod games you get through D2D. Found that out recently. Just sayin’.
It seems to a displeased Fink a logical extension of DLC. Chop games into ever smaller chunks and sell the limbs, which may or may not have been ripped off the torso for that purpose.
I get that as a way to rein in development costs–and making demos themselves is a non-trivial investment, often an extra crunch time ahead of a big show–but DLC almost immediately went far beyond that.
Does that make sense or am I being my normal paranoid grump prematurely old man self?
I love the old PC model combined with Valve’s on-the-sly iterating. Game. Big blob expansion. Tweak balance/problems ongoing.
I guess I’m just not that desperate to play games that I’d consider shelling out 5.00 for demos. If I really want a game, I’ll just buy it at release or a couple of months after release on the relative cheap when I have feel for its quality. Otherwise, as Meho mentions, there a ton of games on Steam where you get the whole game for that price.
Also, why won’t the Recent Comments section see posters new avatars?
Free demos have the right to children, goddammit! Free demos must never die!
I remember Aug/07 very sharply; remember things as you will, but there was NOT a lot of widespread hype surrounding the game that people were still referring to as “the spiritual successor to System Shock 2.”
Then that one mid-summer’s eve it happened: Wham! BioShock demo a week before release. One cleverly timed FREE demo was all it took to sell eleventy-billion copies of the game, or even the system, as it were for folks like me who tasted the demo on PC or simply read about it.
Free demos sell games, people!
What Scout… er Mike said. If I want the game, I’m buying it straight out the gate. If I’m on the fence about a game I’ll play the demo, then decide. I’m not about to pay for what’s essentially a game trial.
I won’t pay one red cent for a demo. Of course I’ve only played a few of them anyway. I’ll read reviews, or read what folks here say in the way of a preview or in the forums about a game I’m considering. If I like what I read, I’ll buy.
But for others who often buy $50-60 games, a demo, even at $5, might make sense. I might even cough that up to avoid wasting $60 on a dog. I can get an adventure game for $20-30 from many sources, or a more expensive game on sale from Steam or elsewhere, so paying $5 for the demo just ain’t gonna happen.
I’m a big advocate of demos or at least timed experiences on the full thing because, quite frankly, I haven’t got the time or the money to be buying blind.
With a book you can have a read of the first few pages there in the shop, with a film you can watch a trailer, but games need that demo; they’ve got to be played. Watching a trailer of a game is like reading about a film, it’s no substitute for consuming it as it’s meant to be consumed.
The PSN is notoriously shit for not offering demos and as a result there have been a number of games I’ve simply not checked out because I had no idea whether I’d like them or not. I simply can’t afford to buy them on a whim. On the other hand Xbox Live (apparently) has a demo for every game it sells which is bloody brilliant. There have been a few games I’ve not bought on my PC because the demo revealed technical issues with my computer — something I wouldn’t have realised until I bought the full game had their not been a demo.
Demos have always and always will be beneficial to me. I’m not convinced that they should be charging for them but I’d sooner pay a small amount for a demo than shell out for the whole shebang and be disappointed. But then again I rarely buy games on release preferring to buy them when they’ve dropped in price.
Why pay $5 for a demo when you can wait 3 months and buy the whole game on direct2drive or steam for $5 or less. 🙂
Seriously though, IMO the only way this would work is if you can pay $5 for the 5 hour demo of the game, and then have that $5 credited towards the purchase of the full game should you like the game enough to buy.