What happened to video game demos? 

Todays video game demos are early access $60 games

i’m glad my algorithm brought me here

I loved getting demos on tape in the 80s (still have them all) from the AA covertape and then from CD's and later downloading them on Xbox live. I would deliberately wait for the demo to be released. A shame they have mostly gone but just what modern game do I really want to play? I don't feel like I'm missing out.

W video, the pizza hut demos were my jam

You completely missed the Robocop Rogue City demo from November that let you do both an action-packed rescue mission and then several cool and laid-back investigations. It clocked in over a few hours. Now THAT was a quality demo.

the demo of Return Fire and Big Red Racing kept me happy in 1995

I'm glad the algorithm brought me here. I haven't thought about game demos in *ages,* but I think a lot of your points are spot on.

Good games have demos. Steam has a whole "fest" for games with demos. Next Fest.

I remember every year playing the fifa demo before the game come out with only 6 teams and time limited games

My man sourced Sakurai in this video. What a goat!

Very good video! I believe if you raise the camera on a tripod or something so you look up at it, it could make for a better angle. Wish you good luck on your youtube journey!

Mi sembri italiano. That aside, I agree with your conclusion. Still, games like DOOM 2016 and Prey 2017 still have their demos on steam. It's a shame they are not avayable on current consoles, at least as far as I know. Still, it's nice that some games still release demos, it's a great way for poor people to try stuff out. Even Minecraft still has the trial period where any new word you make can be played for at max 90 minutes, then you can't change the world anymore.

You have earned a subscriber brother I actually found this very interesting and I didn’t realise game demos went basically extinct sad times 😢

Old Sierra Online games they had a whole new short "game" using the game assets just to give an idea of the game itself.

Wow only 46 subs? It should be 46 000 minimum. The content and presentation is that level (based on thousands of youtubers). But maybe you just got started?

3:08 "marketing is sort of a legacy term"... kinda sounds like saying "farming is sort of a legacy term, and the way I think of it now is growing plants"

remember the batman arkham asylum demo. wow.

I politely disagree! (this endup much longer than I anticipated, english is not my first language so sorry for any typos and such xP) True big companies go for beta tests nowadays (I personally have 0 interest in AAA games, I occasionally try something but I'am not really excited about them) But as a game developer myself (I work in small indie game dev company, mostly level design and optimization) - I recognize fact the games which u so well remember been much easier to develop, they are much less complicated from code side, and rendering, or just amount of people working on it. We can especial see it in AAA Games now how they push fidelity which takes alot of people and work (Which also makes so much easier to have tons of bugs in such huge projects) - this is not excuse for new games "sucking" or day 1 patches, or being expensive, or being unfinished, or being hostile to players in design - I just saying that I kinda understand where these problems coming from, I don't try to justify these problems. Other important point which I think u not mention, the "new" thing nowadays which is more common than demos is for games to have "Prologue" instead of demo which is a playable usually opening of the game, always F2P, often in much earlier development built - which is also made to gather some feedback from players and steer game in direction which potential players would like to see it be developed and expanded. Getting to do that early makes really easy to implement these changes early on. Or make base for implementing them later, if needed without breaking things. And last thing which comes to mind, each year there are Demo Fests on steam, this is quite big, and it helps soo much. This is time where games which dont have demos often get one for purpose of showing game to people, and these demos, steam then pushes these demos to more people. (Yes steam got own algorithms just like youtube) These demos often are just up during this event, also to gather feedback and stuff. This helps a lot to find people which actually are interested in game and wishlist it becouse they are actually interested to play it. About developing 2 game builds (actual game and demo simulatusly) this well is not exactly hard. For once as I said demos usualy are early build of developed game - and sometimes are just left as they are with note this is early build and full game some aspects mind change etc, But its not that quite uncommon for demos to get updates. Games are developed in such way there always are backups of earlier versions (like via github etc) and you can have a "branch" with demo to which u can go back to and threw some new things into it from newset development branch to update it, and make build out of that for demo (ofc I don't need to explain - this is on game to game bassis , and engine and what not) - I personally got most experience with Unity and way we do things ourselves. We had one prologue for our first game which helped us alot to fix some preformance problems on lower end machines, and ofc based on feedback expand it with some new features. With game we work on currently we got demo runing during demo fest which also helped us tremendously. So for any developer out there which is wondering should they take extra steps to have some sort of demo available, I personally say there always is, and for many various reasons - now more than ever. IN past demos been just demos, of much simpler games - now they are way to gather feedback and help find problems. Ok i did not ment this to be so long sorry, but hey that just my 5 cents on the matter , peace!

They became "beta", and you have to pay for it and be thankful

Gamers have to start seroiusly start speaking out and up for casuals some companies think there slick having no demo, no gameplay trailer and then overpricing the game way more than its worth then people buying the game and it ends up horrible

they still exist. they just stay in early access until the end of time