Bothered?
i wish Steam had different sections for demos and prologues because not all of them are labelled as so
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I feel it's not so black and white. It's giving exposure to products giving more money to valve, yes, but it also gives more recognition and funding to smaller indie studios for future projects and maintaining their games with patches and content & whatnot. While I agree that they should have their own category and Valve could be a little more forthcoming about things, I could live with them being in the "fake f2p" category due to the fact that some games truly do deserve that recognition or feedback to allow the studio to improve the game, build upon it or take all that money and create a new game :) With that being said I did think at the time that Stoneshard was just an f2p story title and teenager me got really annoyed when I found out it's a "glorified demo" as you put it XD
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YES!
It suckers you in to something that already has a name..... a DEMO!
A DEMO~nstration of the game they'd like you to buy.
Classically this will let you play the opening sequence of a game, or cap you at a certain level. So i feel that i'd prefer prologue style demo's
But i'm just sick of bait and switch tactics on EVERYTHING!... Look this thing is on sale!(not really, they just marked it down this week to clear out stock before raising the price, and/or offering the exact same product, just less of it.
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I just wanted to add one thing more: dont blame the devs.
Like gabe once said that piracy was a service problem, so is this.
Demos right now have a very hidden dedicated section... if demos showed up on the front page in some way (not too hidden) things wouldnt had come to that.
somewhere near new releases- not a tab but another such list bellow or one of those single row bigger thumbs above with a button straight to demos section would do wonders
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they are demos and some sort of beta access to the game, the reviews are equivalent to a beta test experience report
free testing?
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The first use of a "free to play" prologue of a paid game as far as I can tell was used by Stoneshard, by HypeTrain Digital, back in 2018.
Basically, seemed like a marketing strategy to have a demo get more atention, having its own Steam webpage, and appearing as a "free game", it'd have potential to reach a wider audience.
It probably worked well, because nowadays it sometimes feels like a rule. And I'm pissed off!
Why? Seems like a band-aid solution to a problem, which actually is: demos are somewhat hidden, either because gamers aren't fond of trying demos, or just because Steam store doesn't make a good job promoting them.
Now, we have a flood of "fake free to play" games arriving daily on Steam, that are basically glorified demos that pay to have an additional store page. Steam is, as usual, closing its eye to the problem, because as usual, it's making a profit over it.
Why "fake free games"? Because many times, the prologue is removed without notice along the game release (which also happens to demo themselves often). Probably because devs don't want to bother updating them, or just believe having them over would hurt sales of their games, which is another deeper problem I guess.
What's your take on this? Should Steam do something about this? Should developers/publishers do something? Or should we, as gamers/consumers, do? Or just chill and whatever?
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