- RabidNutCase45
- |
- Exalted Mythic Member
Posted by: urk
Eat raw meat.
Punch a bear in the face.
If you don't know who I am, the feeling is mutual.
Okay, there's too many threads floating around about this. So I've decided to repost something I put down in another demo thread to help explain why people are saying "no demo."
Demos are something put out to give to the public to enjoy and gauge reactions towards a snippet of the game. They can be short snippets of the campaign, the Multiplayer, or both.
Betas are the same thing, but exclusively for Multiplayer. They usually are used for MMOs, but other games can use them if there are large Multiplayer aspects involved to the game (Such as the interaction between BNet and Halo 3, stat tracking, Video / Screenshot uploading, large numbers of people playing, etc). They are generally released for a short amount of time.
Demos are worse than Betas because of their replayability. People will play the demo of a game they like a lot, right? Halo Wars is an example of this, and suffered for it. People played the demo so much that not only did they know everything about the first two missions, they also got bored of it. So when Ensemble released the full game with more units, features, and capabilities, the game was "boring" to some people. When Bungie released the Halo 3 Beta for three weeks people played that but there were only three maps, many weapons left out, a cut down theater mode, and no Forge. It ended, and people waited until September 25th to play it again.
That's also why A-List titles shouldn't get a demo until after they're released (Like Activision does with CoD).
Edit: Just to clear things up I don't mean Beta builds or versions of a game. I'm refering to the public Betas like the ones that Bungie and Infinity Ward did in 2007 for their games.
[Edited on 08.09.2009 1:18 PM PDT]