"With physical events cancelled for the foreseeable future, online demos may be the only way for a developer to provide the public an opportunity to play their game," Van Lepp says.
Some demos even become successes of their own, like Kojima Productions' PT, a prototype for a then cancelled Silent Hills title.
While the quality of the game undoubtedly played its part, the demo also had an important role in introducing a wider audience to the title, which ended up selling six million copies.Īnother example would be Resident Evil 7's demo, Kitchen, which was instrumental in selling the game to an audience that had somewhat abandoned the franchise. It ended up being downloaded two million times in just two weeks. By then, Just Cause 2 had been announced and Avalanche Studios decided to release a demo. It took almost three years for the title to sell just one million copies. When Just Cause launched in 2006, the game's critical and commercial reception was mixed. Just how instrumental demos can be to a game's success is often underestimated by new developers.