Opinion- Game Demos Should Be Ubiquitous

And Why We Shouldn’t Accept Technical Problems.

Image Via Valve.

I love the fact that Steam Next Fest exists. Before it began as the Steam Game Festival in 2021, game demos seemed like a thing of the past. Forgotten alongside CDs and DVDs. I’m part of the generation which grew up with PS1 demo discs, BGamer magazines that came with PC demos, etc. For some reason, they disappeared.

Thankfully, they’re now back in vogue, but they’re not ubiquitous yet, especially when it comes to higher-budget experiences. Why? After all, most games, namely AAA titles have pre-release demos that are either used as gameplay trailers or shown to press behind closed doors. Furthermore, do trailers really do a good job of showing a game?

My hypothesis is that no, they don’t, and demos should be ubiquitous, especially in today's PC gaming landscape.

Demos Are To Videogames What Trailers Are To Movies/Series

Image Via Capcom.

Trailers make sense for cinema. After all, a trailer is an edited, short glimpse into a movie or a season of a show. They can still be deceptively edited or misleading in their nature, but they only differ from their final product in length. The experience is identical, audiovisual in nature.

Videogames aren’t simply watched and listened to, yet we pretend like they are, treating a videogame trailer like we do one for a movie. We’re mostly past of the era of the “cinematic trailer”, and the few that still remain are often received with a collective groan, but that is not enough. A gameplay trailer is certainly better than a cinematic, but does it serve the same purpose of a movie trailer?

Well, do you play your videogames by watching and listening to someone else play them? I’m as much of a fan of streamers like CohhCarnage as the next guy, but watching him play a videogame isn’t equal to me playing it. So no, gameplay trailers are not equivalent to movie trailers because the experience isn’t identical, it is missing its key part: the playing.

While you watch and listen to movies, those are only two thirds of how you interact with videogames. They’re also the least important thirds in the large majority of games. You’re missing the third that makes games stand out from their other mediums, the interactivity. And that is not something you can experience through a trailer. But you can experience it without technically playing the game and without buying it. That’s what demos are for.

Demos Are Back?

Image Via KOEI TECMO. Nioh 3 is a rare example of a big game with a demo, but it was PS5 exclusive and timed.

Steam brought demos back to the mainstream with Next Fest, but they’ve been around for decades. Everyone remembers the PS1 demo discs, packaging multiple demos into a single disc, allowing players to experience multiple games at once and to help them decide what to buy next.

Steam Next Fest follows the same principle with an infinitely larger disc, but it is still missing what made those PS1 discs so special. These demo discs featured the biggest releases of the time, and packaged them with smaller ones, sometimes from the same studio. Not only was this a way for giving smaller titles an extra chance, it was also a way for players to behold what technical marvels the hottest new title was bringing.

While the Next Fest is excellent, it features little to no big releases. Developers like Capcom often break the mold by releasing timed demos for Resident Evil remakes, Kojima broke the internet with his now infamous P.T. Demo, but these are exceptions to the rule.

Notably, Sony barely releases any demos for their big releases, and most AAA titles come out without a single playable demo to the public. This is harmful for the consumer for more than one reason. Trailers aren’t enough for players to gauge what a game truly plays like. In cinematic AAA experiences, the two-hour refund window will often be filled with cutscenes and setting customizations, a problem for consoles two now that most games come with two playable modes.

That is not the only issue, though, nor is it the main one.

Performance Woes

Image Via Epic Games.

Despite technological stagnation in gaming, especially when compared to the history of the medium, developers keep upgrading their engines, be them proprietary or the latest release of Unreal Engine. While these upgrades often come with minor visual improvements, they can also bring massive performance issues. These will sometimes take months or years to solve, if they’re ever solved at all.

This is a problem that has been affecting consoles too, but it will always be an even bigger issue in PC. Developers have an easier time optimizing a game for consoles. After all, they know what hardware combination the player is using, and they can tailor the experience to those exact specifications. On PC, though, players are free to choose whatever combination they prefer. These are essentially infinite combinations that cannot be taken into account when optimizing a game.

With this come problems like the prevalent UE4 and 5 stutters, which plague a ton of recently released titles. For an explanation on what these are exactly, check out this Digital Foundry video by Alex Battaglia, the Stutter Struggle soldier himself.

So not only are players prevented from getting a glimpse into a game like they do through a movie trailer, they’re also unable to even know if the game works as intended on their system. Would you enjoy going to a cinema only to find out that the laser projector is malfunctioning and the movie is projecting at an erratic framerate instead of the intended 24fps? Would you be accurately able to interpret and review the movie through that lens?

Why, then, are we expected to do that for games? If the game was meant to be played at 30 or 60fps, an experience anywhere below that isn’t optimized, neither is it an accurate representation of what the developers supposedly intended. Despite this, games in shameful states keep being released, and players keep buying them.

Recent Examples

Image Via 505 Games.

Capcom’s Monster Hunter Wilds sits at an Overwhelmingly Negative recent review score on Steam due to its laughable technical state (among other issues), yet it broke records for the franchise. Elden Ring: Nightreign came out with most of the technical problems that plagued the original and the expansion, yet most people didn’t seem to bother. In fact, it seems like most have come to terms with the fact that FromSoftware's excellence comes tied with performance issues and terrible pc ports.

Returning to the cinema comparisons, would you still love Tarantino if he filmed using shitty cameras and the movie kept bouncing between 21 and 24 frames per second? Would you still consider his best movies to be masterpieces?

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers released yesterday, and it is yet another example of a terrible UE5 port. It’s been received with Overwhelmingly Negative Steam reviews due to poor performance, and it gets down to extremely low resolution on consoles. Regardless, the game reached a 131k CCU peak and is still sitting at 102k players at the time of writing.

How many of these players would’ve delayed or avoided their purchases if they had played a pre-release demo that showed poor performance on their system? Furthermore, what kind of domino effect could this have on the state of game performance as a whole? Perhaps that’s exactly why these big publishers don’t release demos at all. They would carry the risk of lowering their release sales, and the biggest fish do not need extra marketing.

Reviews Are Fine, But Nothing Speaks Louder Than Money

Overwhelmingly Negative reviews and negative headlines might hurt some feelings, but they don’t leave enough of a mark. After all, what does Capcom care if MH: Wilds still broke sales records? Just last year they were at the center of another debate around performance woes with their release of Dragon’s Dogma 2, but neither of these examples seem to have affected the hype of the upcoming Resident Evil Requiem.

I know these are three different studios, but I chose Capcom because these three games are using the same engine, and the two that have already released featured similar issues. Change will not happen until we start speaking with our wallets, but demos are a great place to start. Show your support to devs who release demos for their games, and share the word regarding excellent initiatives like Steam Next Fest. Personally, I would love it if Microsoft and Sony did something similar for Xbox and Playstation, but I know that’s a far-fetched hope.

So, to conclude: demos should be ubiquitous and performance issues shouldn’t be brushed over just because the game is good (or excellent).

You wouldn’t play a shitty game just because it looks or runs great, so why would you play a great game if it runs like shit?