I am taking time out of my day at PAX East 2013 to tell major publishers that most of you are doing your show floor demos wrong. When fans come to see a game, they come to see a game. Not a YouTube video shown on a big-ass screen.
Let’s start out with the reason I am writing this article: Ubisoft and Watch Dogs. The wait to get in on the Watch Dogs demo was about an hour long when I passed by it last. What does the hour long wait get you? Two, three minute videos. One of which was simply the same video as the one shown at the PlayStation Meeting last month shown from a different perspective.
Is that really how you want to treat your fans? They spend time out of their day standing still waiting to get through a line to sit down for less than ten minutes to watch a video of a guy talking and to watch a month old video. No time for questions, nothing worthwhile shown. Flat out a waste of time. If your game demo can be shown on YouTube with zero quality lost, you have failed.
Meanwhile, I walked around the indie area and in a span of 45 minutes played five different games all in various points of development. One of which, Drunken Robot Pornography, I was able to buy on Steam through the recently announced Steam Early Access. I made the purchase while talking to the developer and playing a very early alpha build of the game.
The entire Indie Megabooth is always swarming with gamers looking to be able to play actual games on the show floor. Too many of the big publishers hide games away from fans for little reason. There is a seriously misguided thought that if people see a game early in a broken state, it will translate to poor sales. This thought persists even when indie games have been sold as alphas regularly for the last two years now to a staggeringly successful degree.
PAX East and PAX Prime is 70,000 people that love games of all types, and they would love to get their hands on a game early. If your game is good, this core gaming crowd will be able to see through any amount of early build jank and see the quality that lies below.
Treating your fans like they are herds of cattle headed to the slaughterhouse is a terrible thing to do, and it will do nothing for anyone. Five minutes of a game being played will stand out more than any 20 minutes of a gameplay demo being shown. Get better at exhibiting your games, major publishers, because right now, things are bad.
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