In dropping an amazing early demo for its System Shock remake on Kickstarter, you can very safely say Night Dive Studios also just dropped the mic on how every videogame developer from this point onward NEEDS to introduce their product should they take the crowdfunding route. Giving potential backers a taste of what’s to come at no cost save for the time it takes to download and play that sample makes a hell of a lot more sense than automatically thinking gamers love gambling blindly on an IP’s popularity, names of famous creators, insane stretch goals and other promises that have popped up with a bunch of other past to current games. As a few high to lower profile games that didn’t meet expectations or that failed to materialize post-campaign have shown, gamers feel the burn from these bad apples and take their anger out on whatever pops up next as a big deal project.
Yes, some of those games got backer-only demos for certain mid-to high tier contributors (boo!). But to me, the idea of paying to play a demo build is a bit lame, no matter how great the pedigree of the team making a game. Although I’ve played some decent ones, Early Access games fall under the same category because there are some that have died on the vine after that demo drops and gets paid for. Granted, crowdfunding sites aren’t “stores” at all and your pledge is just that until the project meets or exceeds its goal and your money is gently lifted from your bank account. Anyway, if you remember System Shock and want to check it out even if you have no plans to fnd this remake, hit up the Kickstarter page and go get that demo on Steam, through the Humble Store or DRM-free over at gog.com.
As we’ve seen with stuff like Mighty No. 9, your assessment is pretty spot on. I kind of think that if you truly do believe in the product you’re building (as a developer), then you should have no qualms releasing a demo build for other people to get excited about it. The only exception to this might be short one-and-done horror games (Slender: The Arrival, for example), where if there’s only a couple hours of play total anyway, you may not want to give it away. But…Even then, I think you could make a short sampling to show off.
Either way, this does look great, so I need to download it when I’m less busy (yeah, right!) and give it a shot 🙂
LikeLike
Oh, you should knock a half-hour hole in your schedule for this. The nice thing about the SS demo is it’s a small download (450 MB, a 1.2GB install size) and clocks in at about 15 – 20 minutes (perfect for an impressions video). For much shorter horror or other games, I’d accept even a slice of gameplay like the Zed demo. SS will make its goals fast, but the demo will go a long way in showing some potential backers it’s worth their money.
LikeLike