I was listening to the Listen UP podcast earlier today, formerly 1UP Yours, and they brought up a very interesting topic: are demos always good for the success of a game?  Off-hand you'd think absolutely, it's always better to get your product out there and a game demo is a form of advertisement.  Take movies for example, all movies have trailers right?  That's the main way most people learn about and get excited for movies nowadays.  If a film studio considered foregoing the circulation of the trailer for their latest hit I'm sure most people would advise against it.

However games and movies are entirely different.  In a movie trailer a director can explicitly pick and choose what the audience sees.  Generally they'll fill the clip with action, big laughs or scares, or whatever else they want to portray in order to entice the viewer most effectively.  With a game though, it's much easier to know right off whether it'll good or bad based on things like controls and gameplay.  If a game has terrible controls there's really no way a developer can hide them in a demo.

When I think about it there are very few instances where a demo persuaded me to purchase a game, and even fewer examples of demos that attracted me to games I wasn't already interested in.  For example, most people consider the Bioshock demo to be one of the best of all time - it helped a ton to introduce the game to casual gamers who might not have already known about it.  It was a perfect demo because it had been made specifically to be a demo. Rather than just pulling out a level from the full game and slapping the demo sticker on it, they mixed gameplay from a couple different parts in the game to give a good impression of the scope of the gameplay.  However, when Bioshock's demo came out on Xbox Live I already had the limited edition of the game preordered, so I can't really consider that a contributing factor to my purchase.  In fact, after reviewing the subject in my mind, the only instance I can recall where I bought a game based solely on the demo was Fight Night Round 3.

On the other hand there have been plenty of times when trying out a demo has killed any interest I had in a particular title.  The example that sticks out in my mind the most would have to be Turning Point: Fall of Liberty.  It's a first person shooter based in an alternate reality WW2 scenario where Germany invaded the United States.  Admittedly I'm a huge fan of WW2 games so the premise intrigued me, and when the demo dropped I made sure to snap it up as quickly as possible.  When I played the game though, the controls were absolute garbage and so I crossed it off of my list of games to buy.  This is just one example but I can think of many more.

One thing I will say is that a demo of a game is usually a very poor way to judge that game as a whole.  There have also been plenty of times where I played a demo and was so-so on it, but then later I played the full game and liked it quite a lot.  Just a couple of examples that come to mind are games like Resistance: Fall of Man and Heavenly Sword.  I didn't like either game's demo, but I enjoyed the full finished product more than I expected.

There's no doubt that demos are good for consumers because it gives us a chance to sample a product before we spend 60 dollars on it.  Still, if I was a game developer and my game was getting pretty good buzz I'd hesitate when it came time to put out a demo for it.  Maybe the best of both worlds is to just hold the demo until a week or so after the game hits the streets so you can capitalize on that first wave of hype.  If your game has problems then they'll be widely known after that first week so it won't matter as much if the demo is out there, and you might inspire some people to buy it despite its flaws.

What do you think?