Game demos are advertising, not revenue

You probably heard Cevat Yerli (CEO of Crytek) talking about the ‘end of free demos’ last week, if not here’s a link to the interview.

None of his comments make any sense to me. Let’s take them one by one:

1. “I think that we’ll see more and more games not carrying a demo in the future, because it becomes prohibitively expensive.”

How does a demo become prohibitively expensive? You are not going to be creating demo-specific assets apart from some splash screens, a bit of coding to cover the premature ending and the ‘wrapper’ for console demos. It is only on PS3 that Sony charge you for each download of a demo – Xbox 360 and PC are free. And if you have scheduled in the demo-specific requirements from the beginning (and you have done that haven’t you Mr Yerli and you’re not just trying now to ‘fit in’ the demo before you go gold?) then you have already factored in the man-hours expenditure.

2. “Also, given the time pressures in making a demo – in fact given the time pressure of making a quality demo – I think it all becomes really difficult to work with…”

Again, if already scheduled in, as any competent producer should have done, there are no time pressures. Therefore there is no concern about making a quality demo. Certainly there can be bugs and development issues that you don’t want affecting the quality of the demo (which is typically taken from pre-Gold code so that it can be released prior to the full game) but that’s why the demo is planned in, to take account of these recognised difficulties. It only becomes “difficult to work with” if you haven’t planned properly.

3. A free demo is a luxury we have in the game industry that we don’t have in other industries such as film.

A couple of points here:

• He is deliberately conflating game demos with price to try to create a duality that doesn’t exist. Game demos ARE free. That’s the whole point of them. PAID demos do not exist. They never have (unless you count those £1 demo discs you very rarely get in games stores). By this reasoning no one would ever give away up to 1/2 of their entire game content for free to entice customers to buy. Good grief, it’s like shareware never existed.
• And he obviously hasn’t watched many film trailers recently. Or development diaries by the director/actors/production crew/special effects team featuring behind the scenes and actual film footage, released for free on official websites to promote the picture. An absolute luxury with no function I can discern for the film or their potential customers.  /sarcasm

4. “Because we’ve had this free luxury for so long, now there are plans to change this people are complaining about it.”

Again with the ‘free luxury’ falsity. Cevat, your customers are complaining because they don’t want to pay for your advertising.

Also, a minor technical point regarding PC demos: many people use these not just to sample the game, but also to see if it will actually work on their near-infinite combination of graphics cards, sound cards, drivers, memory, OS, installed software etc, etc.

Demos have been used for decades to allow the player to sample the game to see if they want to purchase the full title. Start charging for demos and they are going to start NOT buying the demo OR the full game. This is another example of companies trying to ‘lock in’ their content to try and squeeze more money from it. Where next – no gameplay videos unless you pay to subscribe to their website? Each screenshot you view on EuroGamer swipes a 2p micro-payment? The more you lock in content designed to advertise the game, the fewer people see it so the fewer people buy, because they either didn’t know about your game or did but never had the chance to sample it so aren’t going to chance £40.

Bit of a shame he has such blinkered thinking on this issue, as some of the other points he talks about in the interview are valid.