EA considering "paid demo's"

I'd have to agree with SuAside here, the development of Minecraft(http://www.minecraft.net/) is purely motivated by the payments of the people. You just put 50% of the price now, and you get to play the In-Development version of the game. When the game's fully released and done, you just bought it at half the price.
This wouldn't be too bad if the final price of the game gets cut with what you pay for the demo, and it might be good enough to avoid vapourware.

EDIT: Maybe they got inspired after seeing people are buying SC2 beta keys at eBay :crazy:
 
SuAside said:
I'm going to play the Devil's advocate here, and say it might not be entire shit (were it not that it's EA, ofc).

Say, you release a demo 1 year to a few months before the actual release date. You let people pay 5 to 10 USD for it. This funds your further endeavors a bit and aids with final production and debugging expenses (it's a crisis, it's expensive to fund 2-3 years of development for a serious game all up front).
When the game actually gets released, you get a 5 to 10 USD rebate when you buy it (and potentially some added goodies as thanks for springing the required money for finishing the dev cycle without total and utter stress and overly insane crunshing due to money problems).

While I agree a demo should demonstrate the product for free, a new sort of 'preview' could be made... Maybe...
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While your reasoning makes sense, it's basically like saying that movie directors should charge for early previews and trailers to fund filming the rest of the movie. Or make album pre-listens on Amazon not free.

I guess the "rebate" part of the idea is the part that actually makes sense, not the rest of it. I honestly doubt that's what EA has in mind here though. Also, if you buy the "free preview" and don't like it, you'd still feel ripped off, paying for a product you don't want.

Overall, this encourages more blind buying, so fuck it. The customer should have the right to examine the product before buying. In case of games, free demos or free test runs of the game are the only effective way to preview the product.
 
I think the problem here is that this sort of previews would be ideal for small or indie developers. Companies like EA just make it too obvious they're trying to suck more money from every possible source.

I mean, if I putted this game I'm making on a alpha-tryout, and in exchange of a payment for playing a more complete version, I'd get enough inspiration and motivation to finish the game, contact the players for what they want in the final game, have constant feedback about bugs, experiences, etc.

Again, this would be great for a Player <-> Developer(which would be ideal) relationship, but not for the Player <-> Publisher <-> Developer relation we have now, in which publishers suck money from both sources.

Also, Multiplayers Betas are good for finding the bugs, but they don't allow for making big changes to the game, as opposed as the feedback you could get when you just started the development.

So suming up, this idea sucks for a big money-sucking company like EA, but it's pretty good for small developers IMO.
 
Ausdoerrt said:
Overall, this encourages more blind buying, so fuck it. The customer should have the right to examine the product before buying. In case of games, free demos or free test runs of the game are the only effective way to preview the product.
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Even more so since the public gaming press is biased as hell. But not toward the gamers.
 
Even if you get 100 of the bestest most descriptive and unbiased previews/reviews, they can't replace even 10 minutes of playing the demo. Seeing is better than hearing and all.
 
The only way I'd bite onto this type of nonsense is if the game that had a paid demo was a) something I was going to buy anway and b) the demo cost cut down the cost of the final game by that amount.

We need demos though... I was excited about that new AvP game before I played the demo.. the demo showed me that I didn't want to spend my money on it.
 
Sampling (demos) is certainly an important necessity in the business world, taking payment for it would be malicious.
 
I honestly think some of you guys are blowing this a little out of proportion. If you don't like the idea, then simply don't buy any premium demos.

In an ideal world, smaller free demos will still be available. In addition, anyone who owns a premium demo would be able to get some free DLC if they purchase the full game. Unfortunately, EA probably won't adopt that model.
 
Phage said:
In addition, anyone who owns a premium demo would be able to get some free DLC if they purchase the full game.
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The article originally quoted says nothing about this. You just made that up, didn't you?
 
He did, you need to take more levels in Comprehension ;) It's just his proposal what the business model ought to be.
 
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