I need to get something off my chest. Am i the only one that thinks that's stupid for new games not to have a demo version?
I honestly stopped buying new games, as i don't know exactly how will they run on my system. System specs are a joke most of the times. For some games, even if i'm over minimum or even recommended specs, they are impossible to play on lowest settings.
I find it so dumb that developers can't include a small demo, having in mind that their costs for doing that are very small. We don't need nothing fancy, just a piece of game-play, just to see how that game will work on our system.

This thing become a way for developers to make sure that they will sell higher numbers of that specific product. They don't release a demo, people will buy it to try it out. You pay for a game that works with 5 fps on lowest settings even if you meet the requirements, not their problem. We should have more tools, as consumers, to penalize these things.

Yes we need DEMO games when it comes to DRM-Free games but Steam gives Free Weekends and Origin gives Game time.

Yes, that's somewhat of a reason i pirated a lot a few years ago. I downloaded a game, tried it for 2-3 hours if it was worth my time and money and then either bought it or shitcanned it. Here I can at least rquest my money be sent back.

Edit: + given for good thread.

I'm with the OP on this one.

Oh yes, I love to try out new games before spending my pennies.

yea i miss demos

Yeah, I wish GOG could get demos of games for gamers to try out. It might be more feasible if the demos would not be officially supported by GOG--that way Support won't be flooded with new questions.

The free weekends from Steam are not too reliable. There are few games, from time to time. Fallout 4 did not had any free play, for example, neither Pillars of Eternity. While i surely can't get close the first one as specs, i would have liked to see how Pillars it's doing on my system before buying it.

And don't get me wrong, i don't care about content here. Because that's where developers are getting reticent about releasing demos. You get Fallout 4 demo, you don't like the menus, controls, or i don't know, something else that have nothing to do with performance, and you decide not to buy the game due to those facts.

But i think that they shouldn't abandon the idea of demo due to these facts, but instead to remake it into something that don't show you certain aspects of the game, but it still can give you an reliable opinion about how the game will run. Some kind of benchmark test that will apply to your PC, as that's the whole point. You might have some processes in the background that might interfere with the game, or even some malware. Well, and test should be able to tell you that, i don't know, you will run Fallout 4 at maximum 30 fps and at minimum 17 fps on medium settings and at constant 28 fps on low settings, i don't know. Things like "Can you run it" are not reliable as they don't offer enough information.

And i don't know how good it's this information, but i remember that when i was trying demos a lot, in some cases, they were not as well optimized as the final game. So if an demo would work ok on your machine, you were sometimes having the pleasure to see that the final product was working great. It's just something that i remember, but it might not be correct, maybe some kind of placebo effect.

Yep, I agreed with OP but I prefer if some old games has demo too... sometime old games couldn't runs properly on new system.

Would have been very usefull to find out which games work with demos to me.Especially with the confusion needs a 3D accelerator compatible with DirectX 9.0c which i still don't get.And my graphic is only a 8.1 direct x compatible.

Btw i did buy gurumin as my first game here at full price,demo wouldn't have helped with the bug it has at the end.Funny thing is i could play through the whole game only when the true ending cutscene is finished and logo should have shown up the game crashes with some error and d3d9.dll as modname and i though it was my graphic card fault but people have better systems than me and the game still crashes at that place for them.
Have a topic in a subforum posted about this problem which is still unsolved.

Old games shouldn't be sold in the first place if they aren't well patched in order to run good on new systems. I appreciate GOG for this thing, as they are always keeping their patches up and i didn't had too many problems in running old games from them. Steam on the other hand have a lot of old games that do not run well on modern systems. Tried to play Scratches, for example. I had to abandon it, as the whole experience was way too frustrating. After i hardly got the game to stop flickering, i didn't had the nerve to deal with obnoxious controls too. Even if they removed it from Steam, it does not make things better, as i already payed for a game that does not work property.

As far as demos goes, depends on price too. I don't mind so much spending $5 on a game that i can't try before, but for $50 i might have some problems.

In the past, we were more "safe" with our purchases. With physical game you were getting some other goodies, books, maybe some figurines in big box-sets, and you will still having the physical CD. So, if you were not liking that game too much or if it was running bad on your system, you would have trade it for other game. Now you can't really do that with digital purchases. It's a good thing that big game sellers accept refunds now.

Did you not get the memo? You are supposed to buy games on impulse and emotional manipulation, not on actual research.

If you want to actually see or experience a product before buying it go back to the 90's. The modern way is to pay $60 for a game months before it comes out based on cinematic footage that may or may not have anything to do with game play and some contrived bonuses. It's really so much better.

In all seriousness it's kind of weird these days. You either get sold a game on faith, and self created hype without being able to really know anything about it before hand, or your're sold something that isn't done at all.

The demo seems to have been dead a while now. Too bad because it's a good tool for the consumer, but that may be why. If your interested then they already have you to some extent. At that point a demo just serves as a chance to scare you off and that's not what they are looking for.

The games industry is pretty one sided at this point. "Geek culture" is a bit excitable, and enthusiastic on the whole, which makes it easy to manipulate. Something the industry seems to have taken full on advantage of. There aren't a lot of missed chances to monetize gaming content these days. Unless the group as a whole decides we've had enough of being treated like money trees instead of people, then I don't see them handing us tools to make informed buying decisions. They have worked very, very hard to make sure we aren't informed buyers, but impulsive ones.

And I'm gonna go ahead and make sure he gets another copy of that memo.

Greaaaaaaaaat.

You forgot about "Early Access", sir. The "modern way" it's to buy the demo at the full price of the game and, if developer decide to go on with it, you might get a full game in the end. If not... Well, too bad, you spent your money on a demo for an imaginary game.

When it comes to system requirements, I currently don't have that problem anymore since I bought a better graphic card one or two years ago, but I've lived most of my life with sub-par rigs that weren't exactly made for gaming, so I can totally sympathize. I'm pretty sure I made a thread like this myself, a few years back. And apart from system requirements, it's also nice to be able to try out games in general, see if they're to my liking at all.

But I suppose that the latter is also part of why creating demos is not that profitable for companies, especially in times of the internet. Just releasing a simple thing for you to test the compatibility to your system won't do, because if people try it out and there's nothing special in the demo, they'll think the game is not worth buying and tell everyone about it. So if you make a demo, it has to be a well thought-out and perfectly working demo which immediately draws potential customers in, otherwise there's a high risk of putting them off from buying your game instead. And creating such a demo costs quite a bit of money that many developers probably aren't ready to invest, because there's no convincing data that demos mean more sales (and not less).

Anyway, there are quite a few demos for games on GOG, these demos just aren't available for download here but only on the developers' websites, or in some cases, sadly, only on Steam. Check out this GOG Mix, There Is Even A Demo!, that gamefood created with the help of myself (and probably a few others). I'm not sure how complete and up to date it is but it's a start (and it does include Fran Bow, which was released not that long ago, so it can't be that outdated; of course, the demos for old games might be misleading, as there's a chance that GOG did something to make them more - or less - compatible with your PC than the original demo exe is). Also, even though it probably won't make a difference, vote for introducing demos on GOG.

That being said, if you buy a game on GOG that is supposed to work on your computer and it does not, you can ask for a refund. And on Steam (in case you're fine with using it), you can always ask for a refund without giving a reason, if you didn't play the game longer than 2 hours (so it's kind of like a demo, only a bit more roundabout, but cheaper for the developers).