Demo Life
Good Old Demos (acronym is a coincidence, I assure you) Now that it looks like I may have a working computer relatively soon which is about 6 years ahead of the one I'm currently using (even if it'll still be a few years behind average engines and the current racing models) it's lead me to reflect a bit on my PC gaming life. I've experienced many games through their demos, sometimes exclusively...
Good Old Demos (acronym is a coincidence, I assure you)
Now that it looks like I may have a working computer relatively soon which is about 6 years ahead of the one I'm currently using (even if it'll still be a few years behind average engines and the current racing models) it's lead me to reflect a bit on my PC gaming life.
I've experienced many games through their demos, sometimes exclusively. Games like Daggerfall and Ascendancy actually won us over such that we bought the full version, Doom and Thief as well, but there were many games I played only the demo or shareware chapter of. There's a danger when putting out a demo; unless it's sufficiently crippled you may satisfy the gamer playing it enough that they don't feel the need to get the full version (and that certainly happened to me a few times). Yet a lot of gaming purchases now are of the pre-order variety, where players don't even see reviews of games before they get the game itself, and they often wind up being impromptu beta testers for something they paid full price for.
While demos have still been the mainstay of the smaller game producers, thankfully some of the bigger companies seem to be moving back toward the limited demo model. It gives us shlubs a chance to try something before we buy it, since I think a game still has to be felt through the controls and experienced on your system before you really know if it's going to be worth it. When you have some lo-fi indie game it's usually guaranteed to work on some level, but with high-end stuff it's hard to tell. Games are part of what drive the hardware industry forward, so we wind up playing a bit of a guessing game; that, and many game producers wind up putting out faulty code now because of... well, pretty much any reason is valid for at least one case.
So, in other words, once I get my computer running, and I imagine that'll be at least a month of hassle, I look forward to playing demos again. I feel like I went into hypersleep and missed some of the heavier cases of DRM fever, and some of the less demo-friendly years, to find something where you have old games and new ones existing side-by-side, along with plenty of demos.
Who knows, maybe I'll start having opinions about more games created in this millenium after a while. Might even get a Steam account. Crazy.
How This Compares to Other Trends in Free Stuff
Perhaps part of this micro-gaming for free thing is infecting online gaming, where more and more MMOs seem to be offering free modes with potential upgrades. This has the potential to be the same as a demo or shareware, but its reputation is different. Depending on how it's implemented, you can have games that don't really offer very much on the free side of things, and there's always the paid upgrade specter looming over everything you do. It's sort of like the analogy of a layer cake, where a demo is a tiny slice of the cake, but you get to taste most, or all, of the layers, while a free-to-play game with upgrades seems to be just a few layers, like chopping the cake in half. You get a lot of shortbread, if you're into that.
The challenge with micropayment services is to get past that reputation and provide a quality experience that you WANT to pay for (they still have to make money of course, Guild Wars 2 is sort of going that route beyond the initial payment to encourage people to pimp out their character with storage slots or whatever). I wonder if it should even out, to be about the same level of coin you'd expect to pay for any game with heavy production values, but sort of spread out over time. Even off-the-shelf games, with their DLC packs, are really just becoming hybrid experiences themselves.
My old brain still prefers the idea that you pay once for something and have a complete package that you can play through to the end and enjoy, like you might a stand-alone book. I might be checking out these free-to-play experiences to see if they effectively advertise themselves. It'll be strenuous research (not really), but at least it won't cost me more than what I pay to make a fully armed and operational PC.
Made a list that includes the rare XBox demos I played.
Anyone have any decent free-to-play experiences? Demos and shareware are included in this, and the obvious abuses are excluded.