Saturday, July 9, 2005

Oasis: How to create an ineffective game demo




Aren't you trying to sell me something?




A demo is a selling tool!

  • Show 1/3rd of your game in the demo


Alternative techniques


Lessons learned about creating a good game demo

take care



  1. That all sounds so very simple, and yet I was just about to release a demo that included most of the features of the full game. Thanks for the timely wake-up! :)X

  2. I imagine it must have been difficult to decide on how to make the demo of Oasis. The game seems to hinge on the idea of replayability. Its kind of like a game of Civilization or virtually any board game. Sure you can play it once and say you’re done with it, but the idea is to play it again and again to try different tactics and strategies and become better at it. By letting you play once until the end, they probably hoped to hook you by letting you play and say to yourself, “Wow. That was kind of fun, but I didn’t do all that great. I bet I could do better a second time! How much does this thing cost?” or something to that effect. Perhaps that didn’t come across too well or maybe we, as consumers, don’t pick up that hook too often anymore.

    This might be a stretch but the game is similar to Pac-Man in an odd way. Each time you play the game, it’s really just the same game over again. Sure, things are randomized, you don’t start off with the same situation in every game of Oasis and the ghosts don’t act the exact same way each game (at least I think so, I can’t remember if there was really a pattern or not, but for the sake of my example, lets pretend that they’re random). If you were allowed to play one game of Pac-Man, would you want to buy the game knowing that every time you played, you’d be playing the same game over and over? Games like that used to do very well back nearly twenty years ago now. Maybe this form of a hook is no longer effective (or, at the very least, it wasn’t effective on you)?

    Really, I’m just trying to say that maybe Oasis isn’t a game that works too well for shareware and the hook just doesn’t come across as well.

  3. Even with replayable games like Oasis there are ways to create a hook.

    There's a game I play called Strange Adventures in Infinite Space. It is a highly replayable very short game with randomly generated levels. The hook for me in this title was item system and the high score list that was prominently displayed after each game. Within the demo period, you kept seeing new things and you kept getting a higher score.

    At the end, I was like "Oh, I need to improve my score and I want to see more cool things." Quite effective.

    Oasis has both of these elements. They have a scoring system for each board and they have random powerups that you get as you adventure across the map. A slight change in presentation could bring these elements to the forefront.

    If a game is fun, you can increase it's sales with a proper marketing-oriented demo. Some games will always sell more than others, but proper sales execution has a big impact on your revenue.

    One of the themes running through this website is that "If you build it, they will come" is a strong cultural belief amongst game developers. If this approach fails, the response if often "Huh, I wonder what happened? Oh well, better luck next time." This is a naive way of running a business. By applying marketing, consumer psychology, economics and operational management techniques game developers can dramatically improve their chances of making a stable and fulfilling living.