Last GDC I gave a talk about how to design a demo (You can view it for free on the GDC Vault here). I think a demo is one of the most important keys to unlocking extra visibility for your game.
In the talk I recommend 2 big things:
- Get your demo up as soon as you can. I think you should even adjust your plans to release a demo sooner that you were planning.
- Keep your demo up all the time to maximize visibility.
But, some indies are worried about this advice because when a Steam shopper sees your game, watches your trailer, gets excited, then plays your demo, they are satisfied, and then un-wishlisted your game because they no longer are curious and no longer need your game.
The old wisdom
This fear of over-exposing your game is not new.
In fact, back in 2013 there was this quite famous talk on the main stage of DICE that showed data that having a demo HURT sales of a game after it launched.
Here is the talk (I clipped it at the part where the discussion of the Demos shows up, you actually don’t need to watch the whole thing to understand the context)
Here is the specific graph from the talk that clearly shows demos hurt sales.
Basically the chart shows that for Xbox 360, the games that converted the most were the ones that had a trailer but no demo. The theory is that a demo satisfies people so they no longer are excited to buy your game.
Why this chart is not relevant to you and your demo
When a game developer says “Demos are bad they leave potential fans satisfied and no longer motivated to your game” They are thinking this is how demos work:
Basically the demo is a machine that makes people more excited or less excited about a game.
But that is not why demos work so well on Steam for indie games?
Why demos increase visibility and wishlists
The real reason why I recommend demos and why I think they are your most valuable marketing asset is not because they work on the individual, it is because a demo is a key that unlocks 2 HUGE marketing channels: Streamers and Festivals.
Here is actually how a demo works on a Streamer
A demo means that a whole bunch of people can now see your game. In fact, most people don’t play the demo, they are just excited vicariously through the streamer.
THIS is why demos work on Steam in the year 2023. Your demo is providing content for Streamers so they can share your game for you. If you don’t have a demo, you have to wait until your full release before you have something that Streamers can play. Demos are basically a hack to get Streamers to play your game before your full release.
But aren’t viewers satisfied after they play the demo?
Now you might be saying well, what about the people who watch Wanderbots, get excited, play your demo then get satisfied after playing your demo? Aren’t we back to scenario #1.
Strangely, not. I think a lot of people don’t even bother playing the demo. They just see Wanderbots play it, get excited, wishlist it without playing the demo.
Years ago when I did my research project where I watched normal gamers browse Steam, many of them told me they don’t even watch most of the content from their favorite streamers. They trust their endorsement so much they look at the stream’s thumbnail on youtube and the name of the game and will wishlist it from that. They don’t even want to watch the streamer play it because they don’t want to spoil the surprise. Some even said they ONLY watch the streamer play the game if they know they are not going to buy it. Some only watch horror streamers because they know they are too afraid to play horror games and using the Streamer as a proxy is a way for them to consume the game in a more palatable way.
People have a complex relationship with their favorite streamers and it can mean several things as to whether they buy your game.
But one thing I do know is, if a big popular streamer plays your demo, your wishlists and sales go up.
When I wrote about ZERO: Sievert, I looked at the cohort data and found that the highest converting cohort were the people who wishlisted the game during the month that popular streamer Splattercat played it.
I can’t calculate out the exact conversion rate, but when streamers play your game, wishlists go up, and conversions go up. So anything you can do to get streamers to play your game is better and demos are the key to unlock streamers.
Festivals also help
Big, online, festivals like Steam Next Fest give you front page visibility on Steam. However if you want to get in, you usually need a demo. Festivals also give so much visibility that even if a couple individuals play the demo and are satisfied, there are thousands more that don’t play but still wishlist.
Most of the time, people wishlist a game and never play the demo. But, you still need the demo, otherwise you wouldn’t have been accepted into the festival.
Real world example: reversing flat traffic
My opinion on why demos work isn’t just theory, it really works. Here is an example:
Mob Factory is a tower defense meets automation game that is in active development by Lukas VanTilburg. He shared this wishlist chart.
Lukas spent several months marketing his game without a demo and then recently uploaded a demo. Looking just at the cyan-colored line, I bet you can guess when the demo was made live!
That spike titled “Wanderbots” occurred only 3 days after he uploaded his demo.
A similar things happened to Dome Keeper. I wrote about how Dome Keeper earned 40,000 wishlists in a month with a streamer and a very good demo.
The developer uploaded a demo and then a series of Streamers found it over time. If the developer pulled the demo at any point that month he would have lost out on thousands of wishlists. Here is the wishlist data for that spectacular month:
Should I take down my demo?
Another common question developers have is “should I take my demo down after big promotional events like a festival?”
I have heard some marketers recommend pulling your demo after a big promotion because it induces the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) response which encourages people to take action before it is gone.
I don’t agree with this because, again, demos don’t work on the individual level, they work on the global streamer level.
The reason people don’t play our demos is not because of FOMO, they don’t play our demo because they don’t know we exist. So you can’t say “last chance to play this” to someone if they aren’t even there to listen to you.
Here is an analogy of how demos work. Think of your demo as a fishing hook at the end of a rod. The lake is the internet and all the streamers and influencers are fish within it. When the streamers “bite” your hook it is the equivalent of them playing your game. Fish don’t bite your hook because you yell at the lake “I AM GOING TO PULL THIS HOOK OUT IN 30 SECONDS YOU BETTER BITE IT NOW!”
You can’t reason with fish you can’t see.
They bite when they stumble upon a good looking fish hook with good bait. The problem is the lake is so big they probably won’t see it. So you just gotta keep that lure in the water as long as you can to maximize the chances that a fish will swim by. The same goes for a demo. You don’t know when some random streamer you have never heard of is going to find you. So you just need to keep that demo up to maximize its visibility.
Also streamers have a lot of games to play so you never know when they will get around to you. Lukas reached out to a bunch of streamers but they didn’t play his game right away. Here is what he had to say
I did email a lot of them, but some of them made videos a month after, so I think they came upon it organically. I have a hunch they found the game through Next Fest, and dug back through their inbox to find my email afterwards. That being said, Real Civil Engineer did respond to me on the 31st saying he would “try and check it out”, and uploaded on the 22nd, so it could be they just took a month to produce the videos.
Some youtubers seem to be short form, upload within the first week of discovery. Others seem to take months after discovery. I think it depends on the channel?”
Lukas
It would really suck if Lukas pulled his game demo and when Real Civil Engineer finally decided to record the video the game demo was missing.
KEEP YOUR DEMO UP FOR AS LONG AS YOU CAN!
When demos don’t work
I have surveyed the performance of games from Steam Next Fest for several years and I do see there are some games that just don’t do well with demo. The worst performers are games that are based around a “gimmick” or a whacky idea that once a player tries it, they get their fill. Most Steam players expect depth and a sandbox experience. Typically these gimick games don’t have much gameplay or variation.
The element of novelty or surprise is not the main reason people buy games. They buy them because they want to hang out in that world. A gimmick game is like a carnival barker asking you to see the world’s strongest man or the tattooed lady. Once you see it, you got it. But a successful Steam game is like an amusement park that you go back to every Summer.
For gimmick games, a demo would hurt sales but it doesn’t matter: those games don’t do well on Steam anyways. They promise a lot but once played it becomes obvious what is going on.
It’s funny but back in the 70s there were these movies that promised to show viewers the secrets of the afterlife. The publishers of these films knew that they didn’t really have an answer so they would spam tv and movie theaters with the following trailer and try to get as many people to watch the movie on opening weekend because they knew that once people saw that the actual film had no answers, the word of mouth would be terrible. Same deal for gimmick games.
BTW the trailers for these films were amazing:
Bonus: Additional reasons why that chart does not apply
Bonus: There are a bunch of other reasons why demos used to be bad and are now good. The most important context before you read too much t is this chart comes from 2013 and it is for console games.
- 2013 is a pre-streamer world where most people got their game news from game magazines and blogs.
- Console games from the Xbox era were typically 10-hour first-person-shooters which are very content driven. Once people experienced the setting it was still just a shooter but in a different place with different graphics. You could get your fill just playing the demo. Today, successful Steam games are typically sandboxes that encourage endless play and isn’t about the novelty of setting, it is about allowing players to construct their own experience in the way they want to.
- Most XBOX 360 games were developed by AA and AAA publishers and their limiting factor was not platform visibility, but the quality of the game experience. Most independent developers exist on an open and crowded platform like Steam so our limiting factor is visibility. We need to maximize that and demos paired with streamers are a “hack” to get that.