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Research Week - Day 3 - Should I Do A Demo?

4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago3,123 words

My intention today was to read a bunch of articles about how and when I should release a demo. I ended up getting through a single r/gamedev post-mortem and some of the comments before running out of steam!

Honestly, already this is getting mentally exhausting since I really don't enjoy the marketing side of things at all - a common sentiment among indie devs - so I might have to rethink how I go about it. Maybe doing like one day a week, or an hour a day, or something, rather than focusing wholly on it for five days in a row, as was the intention. We'll see.

Today, though, I want to try to answer a couple of questions that are currently acting as roadblocks for my development of Atonal Dreams: When should I release a demo? and What platforms should I release a demo on?

I'm at the point now with Atonal Dreams where the gameplay mechanics (battles) are pretty much in their final form, but they need testing, so I should probably get some feedback about them before starting on the narrative elements (plot scenes, more areas, etc). I'm unsure though whether this should be done as a public demo or as a private alpha test with a few chosen people (likely my patrons), and whether that should be on Steam or another easier-to-upload-to platform like itch.io.

So that's what I'll be looking into now.



Google, "indie game when should i demo"?! INDIE GAME WHEN SHOULD I DEMO??? TELL ME GOOGLE!!

The first result is a post in r/gamedev (feels like everything I need is in there so why look anywhere else, but whatever!), helpfully titled ∞ Should you release a demo of your game? A post-mortem for an indie game demo (with stats) ∞.

Wow, a quick skim shows that this is a long post with lots of data. "TL;DR: Yes", it begins.

Oh, Death and Taxes, I've actually seen a youtuber playing that! ∞ It's got almost 1000 reviews on Steam ∞, so it clearly sold quite a bit. Interesting, especially since it sounds from this post like they started from a place of complete anonymity (their Twitter account had like 30 followers, they said).

They talk about putting a demo on itch.io, and getting attention to it by being in the top 30 Most Recent section on the site.



I've never heard of (hashtag)IndieDevHour. From ∞ indiedevhour.com ∞:



Oh hey, that's today! I don't really have anything to share today though, unfortunately. I wonder whether releasing my dev logs on Wednesday rather than the weekend might be a better idea? I've been noticing I tend to have a creative slump in the middle of the week anyway...



Makes me wonder how worth it it is, though.

This post talks mostly about the results of the demo, though it's unclear to me the stage the game was at when the demo was released, which is the key concern for me at this point.

Interesting; ∞ the one video I saw of this game is also the one that they link to from this post ∞ and which seemed to be a huge boost for them. That youtuber (GrayStillPlays) gets a lot of views.



...they note, in bold, and this has been very much on my mind these past few weeks. Content creators are crucial for achieving big audiences for obscure or nichey games, and Atonal Dreams isn't the kind of game that they'd be able to play with in the way that'd make for a good, casually-watchable video. I've been planning a couple of different projects specifically with how they'd be played by content creators in mind, and honestly I'm eager to get Atonal Dreams out of the way so then I can start work on them.

But that's for later. For now, I can't just drop Atonal Dreams, so I need to figure out how to make the best of it that I can. I'm just glad I decided to go down the Atonal Dreams route rather than devoting years to Divine Dreams!



This is important considering what I talked about in the previous post. They didn't push for any marketing; they barely did anything. But someone picked it up of their own accord and everything happened naturally.



Also important: this kind of attention is like a lightning strike; rare in the first place, but so brief even when it does happen. If you have no way of 'capturing' the audience it draws in, then it might as well have not happened at all.

So I think I definitely need to have a Steam page set up ASAP, before building up any attention, so then if people do hear about it and like what they see, they can wishlist it. Wishlists are used by Steam's algorithm to determine which games to show to browsing customers, and (I'm assuming) people who wishlisted a game get informed when it's released.

This article also talks about itch.io's featured list quite a bit though, and being featured highly in it, so it seems like having a Steam page set up and some version - or page - on itch.io might be the best thing to do? I've also read that itch.io is way easier to set up on (no days of filling in damn forms with your dog's cousin's secondary social security number and stuff), though I don't know much about itch.io in general (I've never used it) so I'll need to look into that in more detail.

They mention excitement about how people seem to read the devlogs they posted to itch.io, because they got view counts of between 180 and 500. Really puts things into perspective! I've been feeling crappy for a while because these blog posts have only been getting a few hundred views, but only because it's relative to what they used to get. A student fresh out of university with a small flat of their own would be overjoyed by it in a way that someone who'd just lost their mansion wouldn't be. It's all relative. But it's interesting that these devlog views were enough for this game to succeed.

They also mention some Twitter stats; mine are a bit higher (about twice as many likes).



I've passively seen some chatter about how DEMOS ARE A BAD IDEA, and this is why I've been stalling for a few weeks, and why I felt the need to research it to maybe decide on something. I'm not familiar with those arguments, but I wonder how many are from developers who've attempted to release demos nobody was going to play anyway (bland, amateurish games like every other with nothing to draw people in), who are bitter about the lack of response and blame the method.

They mention that they got significantly more interest in a WebGL version of their demo on itch, which plays in the browser and as such doesn't require download, installation, etc. In behavioural psychology, there's a concept called response effort, which I think about a lot. It's fairly commonsense: the harder something is, the less likely you are to do it. So if you want to maximise desired behaviours, make them trivially easy, and if you want to reduce undesired behaviours, put obstacles in the way (put the chocolates you're snacking on in a locked box, leave your musical instrument out right next to you). Flash games surely did as well as they did beacuse the barrier to entry was trivial; all you had to do was click on the game's page, and you could play it. WebGL allows for this too.

Would Atonal Dreams work as a WebGL version? I don't know. I wonder whether sites like Kongregate allow WebGL browser games these days. Hmm.



Long quote! So there's (obviously) no simple answer to the question "when should I release a demo?". Atonal Dreams has its basic mechanics down, but essentially none of the story or explorable content implemented. Just a bunch of monsters to fight. Would this be enough for a demo? Would it be wise to release that on itch.io, and/or Steam now, and gradually update it as time goes on, to gradually build up traction? Or should I wait until the game is almost done first, so as to not lose any interest that might be attracted to it? That's a long while off, though.

Unfortunately, this doesn't make it clear. Let's see what the comments say.

I'm guessing this represents the general don't-do-a-demo standpoint:



I ported MARDEK to Steam hoping it'd boost interest in Atonal Dreams, but it had the opposite effect because it scratched the itch enough that people were satisfied and left. Perhaps a demo would be similar? I suppose it depends on what the demo contained. Maybe it should have a bit of plot with a cliffhanger. Hmm.

Actually I suppose it depends a lot on the genre, too. Someone releasing a generic mobile-style puzzler with 100 similar levels in the final version and just 5 in a demo might be less likely to see conversions than a narrative experience which introduces some characters and a situation and leaves the player wondering what happens next. Hmm.

I see some arguing in the comments about ∞ a video from 2012 which talked about why demos are a bad idea ∞, which seems familiar to many of the commenters and likely strongly influenced their opinion on demos. It was refuted by the OP by saying it's irrelevant now and it wasn't even that relevant to small indie games then... Not worth talking about here. The anti-demo people aren't producing any (recent, relevant) data though.

The comments have redirected me to another article titled "The economics of making indie games are wack"; I'll keep that for later.

Someone says, based on their experience releasing a game:



So that follows on from what I looked into yesterday.



Relevant for the demo of a story-based game. Makes me wonder whether a short, separate prologue demo for Atonal Dreams might be best (and my mind fills with ideas, like Collie learning the ropes from Savitr back at the Cloud-Clad Castle, or a micro-adventure of her own back at home after which she's accepted into the Cherubim), though that's (much!) more work.

The OP replied to say that even downloaded demos that don't lead to eventual sales at least help the algorithm to see the game as popular and promote it.

Another link to an article about a Kickstarter success... I'll save that for later.



Interesting to note. And there's a lot of talk about how demos produce wishlist additions which lead to sales... but this is also being contested by other developers. The overall impression I'm getting though is that Death and Taxes dev is basing their arguments on real data and the fact that they have a decently appealing game (as the number of reviews on Steam now shows), whereas I don't know what the others have made but I suspect - based on statistics as much as anything - that their games aren't as inherently good.

This is a really long Reddit thread though, and again it's mentally exhausting combing through it because it's reminding how much of a mountain I have to climb, and how much I don't yet know. For the sake of my sanity, I think I'll end this now and maybe try to make a habit of looking into this for an hour a day or something, maybe with a post at the end of the week instead of just carrying on with this every day this week? I'll need to give it some thought. I suppose it'd make sense to do marketing research regularly though so then it becomes a constant background to how I think rather than something I avoid like the plague and stick my fingers in my ears la-la-la-ing about ("it'll all just work out somehow!!").