Ah demos. I used to play them when they were free on disc for magazines and before that on floppy disc for PCs.
Then I sort of gave up on them because my 360 wasn't wireless and had no hard drive. I played the scant few demos for DS and a few for 3DS because they were wireless. Now I have Wii U and have been all the demos on up on the service.
So I played a couple of demos recentely for what are guaranteed good games - games that have already been reviewed as good and the demos do nothing but put me off them. Hello developers, instructions! Walk me through it. Tell me what I am supossed to be doing!
Instead of walking me through the controls and game systems in a simple and logical manner, they just slice off a section of their game and drop you in cold. You have no idea what button does what, you have no idea what you are doing or how the game systems and environment interact with you. You see icons and markers that you have no idea what they do. It's completely befuddling and pointless. Sure if you bought the full game and whacked down a huge amount of money for a full retail version you would perserve and put the time in to make things work. But in a demo you expect it to just work not for it to BE work.
So they include virtual instruction manuals. These are somewhat useless and this goes for full retail games too. In the days of printed manuals you could have the manual in your lap and read the controls and whatnot and just press the button and see how things work at the same time. Now with these virtual manuals you have to either remember everything in one go or dip and out of menus constantly which is annoying at best, confusing at worst.
You would think with Wii U they would just put the manual on the touch screen and let you still tinker about with the game on the main screen - instead it puts the manual up on both screens which is a lot of good.
Mostly this is a developer problem, stop dumping random bits of your game down as demos and actually build a proper tutorial into it. Like a Zelda game teaches you to aim by taking you to a section where you would shoot some pesky birds or something. Don't developers understand that demos can actually kill a purchase as easily as it can confirm one?
The reason for that could easily be that they're playing demos because they can't afford to buy more games, or that their extensive demo playing is taking up a large proportion of their gaming time, and thus they have no reason to buy more games, rather than demos scaring them off from a game.
What was the game you were convinced to buy?
Those were my thoughts as well. If I was a kid with no money and free broadband I'd download every demo.
Call of Duty 2 for 360. A game that I had negative interest, but the concept of demos at that time was so novel, and the 360 was in its drought, so I downloaded it. Played it, drove to the store and bought it.
Demos suck. However, 90s Shareware was awesome. Here's the entire first act to the game, often consisting of 8 or more levels, totally for free. Play as much as you want, no limitations whatsoever. Enjoying the game so far? Want to play more? Then just pay for the rest of the game when you're ready. I bought so many PC games back then because I got addicted to the Shareware version. Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, Rise of the Triad, Duke Nukem 3D and Quake. Being a console-only gamer, my mind was blown when I found out about Shareware. Unfortunately, it went the way of the dodo shortly thereafter.
It was pretty good. I remember loving gettign demo tapes (yes TAPES) on the front cover of magazines like CU (Commodore User). It was basically as good as getting 3 new games. And the editors were a little subversive, so if the did not have enough games to fill both sides they'd put music on the flipside (probably licensed).
Shareware was awesome. That's how I got my first tastes of Wolfenstein and Lemmings.
Freeware>shareware.