Issues of Access and the Death of Demos

Last night I found myself browsing Steam demos, as I often do. Every couple of months I’ll find one or two that catch my eye, but more often than not, I scroll through the list and discover there’s nothing that particularly sparks my interest. More exciting is the occasional demo I get through Xbox Live, or, less often, a gem like Star Wars Battlefront’s open beta, but these have become rare occurrences over the years. While I appreciate the hour-of-playtime model of many of the demos I do manage to get my hands on these days, I miss the proliferation of demo versions that once allowed me to test almost any game that caught my fancy.

On the face, the loss of demos may seem like a simple inconvenience for consumers, and a boon for the game industry — if something looks at all interesting, we’ve typically got to buy it — but in reality, at least for me, it leads me to be much more cautious with my purchases and may well feed into the attitudes that new IPs are more of a risk in the current market. Testing a game is important to me, as my small hands prohibit me from enjoying some games, no matter how I configure the controls (if I can), so it’s sometimes safer to stick with franchises I know. I can’t imagine I’m alone in this.

For PC gamers, demos help potential consumers test how a game might run on a particular machine — and an alpha or beta release cannot always provide the same experience, as the final product may be markedly different than an alpha. Steam refunds may have made this less of a concern for players using that service, considering the relative ease of obtaining a refund (at least in my experience), but the fact that refunds are available doesn’t mitigate the need for demos; in fact, it can encourage consumers to try and return without putting much thought into an initial purchase. Perhaps that’s an attitude the system seeks to cultivate, but if so, it seems somewhat ill-considered.

For console gamers, however, while systems may be configured so that questions of performance aren’t an issue, there are still questions of access that aren’t often addressed by reviews or Let’s Play videos of particular titles. Individual players may find individual games uncomfortable due to button-mapping or mechanics, and certain configurations may restrict disabled gamers altogether. Recent innovations such as Microsoft’s customizable Elite controller can help with some access issues, but the hefty pricetag and spotty availability of the controller means that isn’t a solution for everyone. Further complicating the issue is the increasing lack of rental game access. Here, around the university, there are a couple of stores that continue to rent a small selection of poorly maintained games, and of course, there’s Redbox, but the selection there is also limited. Mail in our area is notoriously slow, so a service like GameFly isn’t a great option. And we’re an hour from a major metropolitan area, and positioned near a major university with its own population in excess of 40,000. What’s this landscape look like for someone in rural America, where struggles with persistent Internet connections already create issues for some gamers? What about across the world?

Games are expensive, and require equipment that increases that cost; that means that those of us without loads of disposable income have to navigate the gaming landscape carefully, deciding what can be experienced quickly with a copy borrowed from a friend (which may have its own problems, with games requiring installation), or through Let’s Plays (I can watch; maybe I don’t need to get my hands on that one), and what must actually be played more extensively. Purchasing a game then becomes a question of how much enjoyment I’ll get out of a particular item — how many hours will it take to accomplish everything necessary? What’s that cost breakdown over the next three months or so, then?

Everyone may make these choices differently, but for me, it’s led to some very specific purchasing habits. I tend to buy only games I’m very invested in, like Metal Gear Solid V — but only after playing with a friend, or I’d have never purchased it — or very inexpensive games on Steam, often when on sale. Mid-range games, the games I might most want to test through a demo, instead pass me by. I never bought Ori and the Blind Forest, for instance, because I heard so many different takes on the game and couldn’t try it. Kentucky Route Zero spent months languishing on my Steam wishlist. A couple of twenty-dollar games I may or may not love for a limited time, or save for one major release that I can play for months? It’s an easy choice — but those mid-priced games might end up on my systems faster, given a demo.

Or not, of course; that’s the risk of a demo — players experience a very limited section of a game and may decide they hate it. They can be costly to produce in an industry already hit hard with production costs, too. But it’s the ability to make that informed choice that I miss, and it’s a void that all the Let’s Plays and game reviews just can’t quite fill, and I continually wonder if my relationship with games wouldn’t be a little different if we hadn’t lost demos.