Game Demos Solve My Biggest Modern Gaming Problem

Summary

Last year's abundance of games led the author to spend a significant amount of money on games, only to find that many of them didn't meet their expectations.
The author believes that giving a game an hour or two to make an impression is sufficient, and personal preferences can play a big role in whether a game is enjoyable or not.
The author suggests that demos should make a comeback in the gaming industry, as they allow players to determine if a game is worth their time and money before making a purchase.

Yes, I’m saying it again, as if the entire industry hasn’t said it enough: last year had too many games. In 2023, I spent an extraordinary amount of money on games that I’d heard were promising, so that I could find out for myself if I would fall in love with them. Thankfully, I can take all that money spent on sweet, sweet games out of my taxable income, b☂ecause if I couldn’t, I would be a lot more pained by the amount of money I threw on experiences that just didn’t click for me.

I bought a lot of games that I realised almost right away were not going to rank highly on my game of the year list. I always want to give a game a fair shot before I write it off as just not being for me, which means an hour or two is more than enough time for me to decide if I care enough to finish the game or not. Often, it’s not even a matter of whether the game is good – there are plenty of critically praised, good games that I just didn’t like, for whatever reason. Maybe it was too scary, maybe the pacing was slow for my taste, maybe I found the story trite, or maybe the game gave me too much freedom and it freaked me out.

Breath of the Wild is one of those games Iꦏ simply did not get. I didn’t even bother trying Tears of the Kingdom.

This is a personal hangup from years of worrying about spending money, but because I’m spending money on games, I feel awful when I give up so quickly. So, I gaslight myself into belie🅷ving the game might get better, or it might grow on me, or there’ll be some last-minute twist that surprises and thrills me. I’ll stick with ꧑a game I shelled out money for to the end, waiting with bated breath for it to change my mind if I don’t like it. And then it won’t change my mind, and I’ll have fallen for sunken cost fallacy again, and nobody wins – except the developer I supported with my dollars, and that knowledge makes the loss more tolerable.

The so☂lution: demos. Obviously🧸. If I’m not spending money on a game, I’m not going to feel obligated to spend hours finishing it, which saves me money and time. Within the hour a demo affords me, I can tell whether or not I’m going to enjoy my time with a game or not.

Alternatively, I could examine my tense relationship with money, but that sound♑s much harder than begg🍬ing studios for demos.

While the practice has largely fallen out of favour with developers, I think demos have a place in the industry. After all, they still exist in some form – it’s just that we more often see them as less-polished preview builds offered exclusively to press for early coverage. But there is a lot of value in offering demos to the masses. It builds goodwill with audiences, it’s good promotion (if the game is good), and most importantly to me, it helps me figure out if the game is a worthy use of my time or if I’m better o🦩ff playing something better suited to my tastes.

My colleague George Foster said thatও Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is surprisi𒆙ngly hard, and I tend to be easily frustrated, so I’m worried that I’ll bounce off it. I still want to give it a shot, because the game looks really fun, but I also don’t want to pay for a game that is going to💫 immediately raise my blood pressure to the point where I have to give up. I’m okay at platformers but not great – I never made it to the end of Celeste. But guess what? The game has a demo available on all platforms! I don’t have to guess if I like it,✅ I can try it out. Demos save the day.

All I c🐟an hope is that demos become common practice like they used to be. You do sometimes see demos on Steam, especially for indie games that need the promotion more, but it’s much rarer to see them made for triple-A games. There are so many games releasing in 2024 that I want to try, and demos will help me narrow down my list to the ones I really love.