I subscribed to PC Gamer magazine during the mid and late 90s. As a kid it was the most exciting time of the month to receive the new issue, flip through all the articles and reviews, but most importantly see what demos came on the demo disc.

I always loved playing demos. These days there don't seem to be as many demos, which is a shame. I think if more people could try games before committing to a purchase, there would potentially be less piracy. Not definitely, but potentially.

In the older days it felt like it was strange for a game to NOT have a demo. These days having a demo is rare for major releases. However, indies tend to more frequently use demos to attract people to products they might not otherwise be interested to play.

I still have all my old demo discs in a closet. Just being able to try 10-15 games each month felt like a complete experience within itself. But I understand that with digital purchases relying a bit more on impulse, developers probably want people to pull the trigger and not have any opportunity to wait. Up until the 2000s, buying a game was like a multi-step process:

- read about games in a magazine
- play demos
- find out when the games are released
- wait and save up money
- choose which game you want most, beg parents
- buy the game at a store when it comes out

Now, it's

- buy game on impulse during sale.

Not better or worse by any means, just different. But I sure do miss being able to try more games with demos. It's not a terrible thing we have fewer demos these days. Anyway, my nostalgic rant is done! Thanks for reading.

:)

For me, demos in the old days was a way to play new games. With the limited amount of games I had at hand, and the even more limited budget with which to buy games, the demos were something new to play.
That changed at about 2000, when I did get access to high speed internet. After that, I didn't have trouble finding new games to play, thus demos didn't matter to me. As to whether I could run a game or not, that is also a problem I rarely encountered, thus didn't need a benchmark.
So no, while I do accept the fact that quite a lot of people like the idea of demos (and I did enjoy Defender's Quest demo), I don't miss them.

That's the thing - I often felt like playing demos was like playing the full game. It obviously wasn't, but like you said it was the best way to play a variety of games.

Internet killed the game demo star.

I don't really miss demos - I tend to buy games at a price point now where it doesn't matter that much if the game is a dud.

That said, the lack of demos has contributed to my reluctance of buying newer, more expensive games. Given that reviews are very unreliable for me as a customer, and word-of-mouth is very unreliable for the game's publisher, demos are the last remaining method how a publisher could convince me that their game is worth buying before it goes on massive discount. However, demos are rarely provided for the game's I'm interested in.

Back when I subscribed to PCG it was for the Demo Disk and the Magazine was the bonus. Now we can get games demos when available for a simple download and storage is so cheap it just doesn't make sense for me to subscribe any longer.

I still find demos very useful. I often download and try them for games I have a mild interest in, and I'm always disappointed to find out a developer didn't bother to provide one. Good demos have made me pay the full price for games I'd never have bought otherwise. They're not just an indicator of whether I'd actually enjoy playing the real thing, but also an important means to find out if the game would run on my rig at all, since I don't have a high-end PC and currently only onboard graphics. I can't fully judge their compatibility just by looking at screenshots and gameplay videos, and sometimes not even by checking the system requirements. Lots of indie games with simplistic looking 2D retro graphics are actually quite demanding nowadays because of the engines they're built on or the graphical effects they use.

yea i am all for demos, i still look for demo when a new game comes out and not finding it really makes me think should i bother getting the game, and really hate that most demos now a days are steam based

for example half life uplink demo was far better then the original game

I LOVE demos, especially the old 90's ones, and I'm sad to see them go. The reason is a demo really was an art form all to itself. Back then, demos had the following great features:

* No slow tutorials, instead a quick way to get you into the game
* Lots of great content packed into the first 30 minutes of gameplay
* Often ended on a cliffhanger: glimpse some huge new enemy, enter a beautiful new environment, etc.
* Awesome splash screens showing the cool stuff ahead (often included taunts from the villian, etc.)
* Sometimes all-new levels were created for the demo so as not to spoil the game.

All this more often than not had the intended effect of getting you hyped for the game. For many games from this era some of the most memorable things about them were the unique aspects of the demo and how excited I was after playing it. The real game was usually good, but never evoked the intense feeling of excited anticipation I felt after the demo.

I still like demos, though I don't play as many as I used to. Recently the demo of Defender's Quest is what got me to buy the full thing, so it was definitely working as intended. For indie games there still seems to be a fairly strong culture of demo-making, but for the big publishers they don't bother with that foolishness, they just spend millions on marketing.

Demos are still a great way for folks who can't afford a huge marketing department to get exposure, but I guess the big guys who CAN afford marketing don't want to potentially turn people off a bad game with a demo; they'd rather have them buy the full thing before they realize it's bad. (Buying off game reviewers goes with that as well.)

It's a shame we don't have more of them.

Your absolutely right about the big guys. It seems to me that demos would also help ensure that devs are making quality games. If someone can try your game before buying it, you better make sure that it is a) and good game and b) playable. Perhaps demos would also cut back on issues like the Skyrim fiasco.

What was the Skyrim fiasco?

I miss game demos because money is precious. I don't want to waste money on bad games. And that is probably why there aren't many demos around nowadays. They want us to waste money on bad games. Fortunately, nowadays there are so many sales that not much money is wasted when someone buys a bad game.

Yeah.
When I was a young teenager I played the Dawn of War demo. It engrossed me so much into the 40K universe that I've bought every single Dawn of War game on release.
But now with the prevalence of high-speed internet, people aren't playing demos of games, preferring the other try-before-you-buy option. It certainly isn't helping that major publishers are reluctant to release demos, although they are starting to come around, very slowly.
Plus demos are really hard to make. How do you make a demo that's enticing enough that you'll buy the full game but isn't extremely short?

Since no one has bothered linking this: http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/demo-daze

Yep, it actually probably is mostly our fault as gamers. From a developer's perspective demos are a poor gamble.

Still, you can always write and tell the game devs that you didn't buy their game because there was no demo.

I actually kind of like platforms like XBLA that have them built in as part of the platform itself.

Interesting video, thanks orcishgamer (and congrats on 1200 rep).

I don't think consumers killed demos per se, I think it's just the nature of how the industry has gone from having various developers, big and small, trying to advertise their games in magazines and on the internet to now having major developers with loyal customers and many smaller developers who can't risk losing sales. I'd say that the various risks and such outlined in the Penny Arcade video existed back in the 90s. The difference is that now game purchases are more impulsive and rapid from sales and shorter marketing campaigns.

Side note, one other great thing about demos was testing how the game ran on your system. In fact that was probably the most useful pragmatic aspect.