XBox Live Arcade demos suck!

[SineSwiper]

Seriously. They totally suck. They completely FAIL at the goal of trying to get you to buy the game.

I was playing a demo called War World. It looked like a neat mech deathmatch game. The only option I had was the deathmatch match with AI and the default mech. Fine, whatever. So, I play and I literally have 60 seconds of play time. Okay, so I play to 60 seconds and it asks me if I want to buy the game now.

Do I want to buy the game?! FUCK NO! You just interrupted my chance to evaluate the game in a proper manner and because of that, I'm not buying your stupid fucking game!

The new Mega Man 9 demo is another example. I actually brought myself to play this game just for the hell of it. I get to play Concrete Man and the game is exceedingly hard, so I die often. After dying three times (which might as well be 60 seconds), I'm asked if I want to buy the game now? FUCK NO! (Besides, the game sucks. I forgot how much Mega Man sucked.)

The demo for BC:R is similar. You get to play one-third of one level in a 15 level game, and no boss fights. A demo should at least give you 10% of the full game.

Examples of good demos:

1. Braid. I get to play two levels of the game to get a chance to explore it, and I was hooked in with the music, graphics, story, and puzzles all at the same time. When it asked me to buy the game, I did not hesitate.

2. Operation Darkness. Say what you want about this game and how it reviewed, the demo was still good enough to let you evaluate the game properly. You get a bunch of characters with different skills and get to play about an hour-long battle in this strategy RPG.

3. Too Human. Again, probably not a good game overall, but the demo was great and it lasted a long time. It encouraged me to buy the game, which I quit playing after 8 hours.

[Tessian]

I enjoyed Castle Crashers demo, that didn't show you everything but it gave a good example. Let you play to the first boss and then playfully stopped you in the middle of it (the crowd around the fight all stood up). It convinced me to buy the game and there is still much more to it than just that. But I agree, most demos are done poorly

[bovine]

operation darkness and too human =/= xbla games. I agree with you though. I downloaded some xbla demos when I first got the 360, but found them to be so short and lame that I didn't want to even play the game by the end of it. Braid was the highlight of the xbla demos, sinec I heard so much good stuff about it, downloaded it, and really enjoyed it. I'd certainly buy it if I had move videogame money lying around. The only games that I bought on xbla were ones that I was already hyped for (rez, castle crashers, and penny arcade adventures) or ones that I heard were good from people who bought them (pac man CE).

[Don]

I'm thinking half of a game is a good length for a demo. I can't think of any game that was worth buying where you can play halfway and say okay I got my half of enjoyment here and I don't care what happens after. Given that most of the good stuff in a game tends to be concentrated toward the latter half you're probably only really looking at 25% of a game's total enjoyability in the first half.

Now obviously not everything lends itself toward dividing into half of a game. And obviously people won't actually do this because then you can't fool someone into buying a game that actually sucks. But really if your game is actually supposed to be good, I don't see how it'd ever make sense to stop playing at the halfway mark just because it's free.

Even World of Warcraft lets you play to level 20 for free (if you have a lot of friends anyway), which is a decent chunk of gameplay.

[Tessian]

There is no such thing as a demo for MMO's, so you really can't use WoW as an example. MMO's are going for a completely different model (your continued subscription as opposed to your $50-60) plus after your trial expires you can't play anymore unlike a demo. Letting you play the full game for a few weeks is simple for an MMO, especially when doing so could convince you to start subscribing for years. Regular games require developers to spend a lot of extra resources to put together.

Half a game is way too long too, but I think it'd be a good idea to have demos that aren't restricted; just shortened. Give me the first act/level/whatever. The reason for shorter demos isn't to trick you into buying a bad game, but more because they don't want to waste so much time. Plus they wouldn't want to give you HALF the game for nothing.

[Don]

You can just find another friend to give you a free trial account for X days. Sometimes the same friend can give you a free trial multiple times before it stops working.

Half might be too much for some games, but let's say Megaman 9, having 4 out of 8 stages playable is roughly half (ignoring the Wily stages). It's enough to see what variety there is in the game, and if you're going to just play 4 stages and stop then you probaly would not have bought the game anyway. Doom, as Shareware, basically offers 1/3rd of the whole thing for free and you can argue there really isn't that much variation in the next 2 episodes so I think you can say Doom gives you half of the game, possibly more, as a demo.

The only drawback would be that companies would probably make less money in the short run because if you give that much content you'll end up exposing the fact that your game sucks and no one actually want to play it for that long, as opposed to like a 60 second version of the game where people might be tricked into buying the whole thing. But I think in the long run it'll work in their favor as long as the game doesn't suck.

Some random examples I can think of offhand:

Shooters - Half of the stages usually gets you to a point where the game starts to get hard, and shooters tend to save the good stuff for the last level, and assuming the player is aware of this, he should realize there's more good stuff (in theory) to come.

Fighting game - Take a game like Street Fighter 2, offer 4 character that can do say 6 stages each. Not sure how you'd handle the versus part.

Action games - Ninja Gaiden 1 has 6 stages, and offering 3 out of 6 wouldn't be too much. Again games that save the best for last naturally favors this setup, and there's an awful a lot of game that are designed like this.

RPG - No idea here.

FPS - Doom offers more than 1/3rd of the game for free as shareware.

RTS - Starcraft has some 3-4 mission long campaign demo. The whole thing is like 3 campaigns X 9 missions, but once you've seen one campaign you've seen them all, so I think 3-4 missions is actually pretty close to half of a game.

Not everything will lend itself toward giving out that much content, but plenty of stuff worked while giving out that much content. If you have Diablo 2 that lets you play Act 1 & 2 for free, I don't think it's going to hurt the game. Even if you just have Act 1 is a pretty big part of the game when you consider that subsequent chapters don't really add that much.

[SineSwiper]

I realize that full games aren't really XBL, but it seems like the full games have the better demos, because they can afford to give you 10% of the game and still have a long demo. However, any good XBL game should be around 6-10 hours of gameplay (or more), so they can afford to give you one hour of that. Not 60 seconds.

Actually, I thought the Castle Crashers demo was pretty piss poor. At least give me two stages with two full bosses.

As far as RPGs, I do have some demo examples. Eternal Sonata had a pretty good demo that showed you a dungeon that was actually several hours into the game. (FF12 did this, too, in their demo.)

Xenogears' demo was pretty unique in that you got to play a level 99 Fei at the beginning of the story. This allowed you to see all of the combos for Fei, but only for Fei. The demo stopped when the Gears arrived in Lahan.

[Zeus]

Demos should always be long enough to give you a taste of what the game's gonna be like. For MM9, it should be one full level. You should be able to go through Concrete Man's level and beat him. For BC:RA, they should have given you the tutorial, first level, and maybe the first base area. What they gave you sucked ass. Mind you, both those games were made for the core fan who was gonna buy it regardless, but they shouldn't give up on bringing in the non-core fan.

Braid was a decent demo. As was Castle Crashers. The Geometry Wars one was pretty good, you got to play for 4 full minutes. And the Duke 3D one lets you play two full levels. But I agree, for the most part, they do suck.

[Anarky]

Xenogears' demo was pretty unique in that you got to play a level 99 Fei at the beginning of the story. This allowed you to see all of the combos for Fei, but only for Fei. The demo stopped when the Gears arrived in Lahan.

Well that and the two other characters showed up early, which was nice.