Having skimmed through this article, the article actually sucks. Like, actually.
Why would game demos set unrealistic expectations? That’s only the case if they spent 90% of dev time in the first 10% of the game and use that as the demo. This happens, but this is bad design, this is not a case of a demo hurting a game.
I remember playing the Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker demo a long time ago and it did not spoil the story (which is a big aspect for MGS), it did not take away from the experience, and it introduced me to some of the fundamental mechanics of the game.
A more recent example is perhaps the demo of Enotria: Last Song. Do you think I know the lore and story just by playing the demo? No. Did it introduce me to the core mechanics of masks and a few other things? Yes. Was it good to get player feedback and fix bugs? Hell yeah. Sure, you might not like the game, but that doesn’t change the fact that the demo had a successful impact i.e. it gave both parties (us and the studio) a significantly better understanding.
Don’t put peak content in the demo and it will result in it actually playing like a demo.
Design the game with the demo in mind, don’t make it an afterthought. Demos are very valuable and I’m sure lots of gamers pirate games before buying them, instead of actually buying them, because 2 hours for a Steam refund just isn’t enough! I spent around 6 hours playing the Enotria demo (just for 1 complete playthrough). Why so many? I had to familiarise myself with the mechanics, switched between keyboard and mouse multiple times, tried to see why I was getting frame rate drops despite my RTX 4070 renderring at 1080p 120 fps.
**Game demos do not hurt a game! ** Abusing game demos as purely a form of marketing by making false promises or setting false expectations hurt the game.
This is not exclusive to a game either. Consider a recent release like Elden Ring, absolutely massive map, they did not try to over-sell it. They said it’s around 30 hours of content iirc. You can hurt this game with social media, with interviews, with false trailers, with many things.
TLDR; Angry old man starts raging about “back in my day we had game demoz”.
I’d say this is the perfect time to start a really regular and dedicated games review site. They have to start somewhere and if you’re trusted and good then you’ll get a following.
It’s tough. A long-standing rule of video games media–even well before web publishing–is that reviews don’t pay the bills. Hype gets clicks, as do guides now that independent guide writing has waned.
Tachyon was the best space fighter game ever. Even had Bruce Campbell doing some of the voice work. The physics were awesome and the storyline was good.
I love how the comments so far are complaining about “clickbait headlines” when in the article he says he doesn’t consider these to be “clickbait” because the definition doesn’t fit these.
That’s probably because the definition is a personal one. In the very literal sense of the word, a headline baiting you into clicking onto it needlessly is clickbait. It baited you into clicking.
And while the author is free to use a very narrow definition, it’s entirely reasonable - and has as far as I can tell become the norm - to define it as any headline where the article only says something that would have trivially fit into the headline to begin with.
So for example, this very article could be better titled “Clickbait has made video game headlines exhausting to read”, and without being longer it would convey the crucial part of information - why is it exhausting?! - without someone having to first open and scan the article. Which, if the article were well-written, they’d still want to do, assuming the subject matter is of interest to them.
And that’s the thing: clickbait precludes being allowed this choice. By not telling you the crucial piece of information, you are forced to open the article (generating ad impressions!) to find out whether you want to read it or not, often wasting time diagonally scanning said article.
I enjoyed Alan Wake 2, but there’s a lot of creepiness and jump scares. Way more than the first game. Wouldn’t recommend it to anyone unduly unnerved by horror.
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