Not news to me. Let me tell you a story. It’s based 100% on personal experience, very little of which is from the games industry.
So, once upon a time, I was a teenager, who was going to college. I needed a job. I (eventually) got to work in a local grocery store. After about a year, an opportunity came for a promotion - I went from bagging groceries to food demo work. It was good - I immediately got roughly a $1.75/hour raise and two more hours per work day to work! Good times all around!
…Until I had to actually do it.
The way you sell food in a grocery store, is identical to selling games through demos. You make the food - carefully, with great attention to smell output, how it tastes, the presence of item close-at-hand for those impulse buys, you make noise…and from there you pretty much give people food and pray they buy. It’s more complicated, of course. You have to know how to make it. You have to take temps to ensure safety. There’s setup, sometimes there’s kits to aid your efforts, sometimes you make your own. Sometimes it works, sometimes you horribly fail.
For the first three years or so, in a manager’s words I was “the redheaded stepchild” of the sales efforts. Yet, I was doing exactly as I had been trained and told was the “right” way to sell food. Yet, all that I was getting from my efforts was A) low sales, B) grumpy reactions from bosses, and C) grumpy reactions from the people I was giving food to. It was a no-win scenario. I’m all but sure they were going to bust me back down to bagger for a while, and with good reason - the numbers never lie.
Eventually, I got sick of it. I could tell it wasn’t working, and I’m the kind of person who can fail if and only the failure is fruitful - this was the polar opposite of that. I was considering quitting, so I wasn’t afraid to try things the Asvarduil-as-a-demo-dude way, and this was a four part plan. Part the first - no more samples. Part the second - do more research on the item and my local demographic. Part the third - since my customers were already conditioned to get stuff from my stand, fill it with buyable product, which leads directly into part the fourth: use coupons and other things to eliminate buyer’s guilt.
Numbers were what truly mattered, but interestingly enough, I was able to do this without sacrificing my ethics. I was open and honest with my customers. If something had sucralose in it, and they risked adverse reactions? I’d show I cared - I’d tell the truth and say, “maybe next time.” You’d be amazed how well being a salesman who was genuinely trying to pair products to people who could enjoy them safely, worked. Those numbers got bigger. Sometimes, I even outsold the most senior salesperson there. I mentally laughed my butt off when I was told, “You’ve really turned it around! Whatever you’re doing…keep doing it.” If only they new that what I was doing was pretty much telling conventional grocery store sales wisdom what it could do with a block of cheddar, a length of string, some high-gauge wire, and 120V at 10,000 Amps.
You wouldn’t think this would work. You’d think this is crazy. Who - in their right mind - would buy stuff…without tasting it!? Well, you’d be surprised, and the reason is somewhat counterintuitive - you’ll find it’s easier to sell an idea, than something that is directly experienced. When you’re exploring something unknown it simply has more intrinsic value than something you know intimately for a short time. For food, if you’ve eaten it, you no longer want it - you can go back to what you normally eat. For videogames, if you’ve played it, you no longer want it - you can go back to your pet favorites.
This is why I didn’t follow through with The Hero’s Journey on the Ouya, even though it later turned out that my game wasn’t as good as I wanted it to turn out. The Ouya made demos for games mandatory. As soon as that little detail came out, they lost me - I’ve seen this before. Not months later, my predictions turned out to be accurate - Ouya was bleeding developers. It wasn’t because the hardware was terrible, it’s not that different from your average smartphone. It wasn’t the idea - I don’t think anyone writes games because they don’t want to see their work on a console. It was the execution. If I invest time into writing platform-specific code, I want at least a little return on investment.
So…no. Demos are not a good idea. They’re not in food, they’re not in games, for the same reason. I think this is why the various Expos are a major thing - you can show your game, generate hype, whet appetites, but without players feeling like they’ve “already had” your game. This is the reason why Let’s Plays and Dev Livestreams are effective - you can show the value of your game, but without giving players the feeling that they’ve already possessed it.
EDIT: Piracy. That’s the stickler. Piracy is either one of two things - someone who just won’t buy, or someone who has to turn to shadier channels to obtain, since legitimate acquisition is, for whatever reasons, not an option.
The first option, you can’t do jack about. There are lazy-butts all over the place. The only legitimate option for them, is to mourn their lack of ability to be better people.
The second option, though…that’s the good part. With games, we have options. Digital downloads are king. Make that product available, allow people to legitimately get your quality good. Break the barriers to buying. I kept product on my demo cart for a reason.
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