I'm curious to see if publishers will be willing to opt into this. On one hand, letting someone sit through the install time and see if they enjoy the game before paying for it probably significantly reduces the hurdle of "hmm, do I really want this game" for many consumers. On the other hand, if your PC port is a shameless, unoptimized moneygrab then players realizing that fact might balk rather than committing to actually buying the game.
It could also end up encouraging longer "tutorial" sections at the beginning of games, which you can aggressively optimize to give players a misplaced confidence that their computers can run the game effectively.
Therefore this doesn't really change much when it comes to realization that the game sucks very early on.
I suppose there is some small risk difference between "play 90 minutes for free, then decide to pay" vs "play 120 minutes for full game price, then get it back". But in my experience and from what I've heard over the years the refund policy is reliably honored.
I have about 150 games in the backlog that I buy in sales to play later, when I don't like them after 30 minutes I just refund them. Steam has been pretty good with this, doesn't matter if I bought it months before, they will still refund them.
I guess the demos would be better for Steam as they don't lose credit card fees.
Refunds don't generally get the fees returned, so I buy a game for $10, $0.30 in fees goes to Paypal, Steam gets $9.70. I return the game, Steam gives me $10, but PayPal only gives them $9.70, so they're out $0.30. Across a million returns that adds up.
> Valve will refund any Steam purchase if made within 2 weeks and with less than 2 hours play time
Yea, I tried to take advantage of this when I picked up Stellaris, but that's not a game (I don't think) that you can evaluate in 2 hours. I gave it a couple of stabs, but found it just way more complex than I was interested it. I obviously played it more than 2 hours, and they wouldn't refund my money. No harm, no foul, but for some games, 2 hours isn't enough.
We must be very different people... If a game or movie doesn't grab my attention within the first 15 minutes, it goes in the round file. Life is too short for mediocre entertainment!
Being complex and taking time to get into is quite different than being mediocre. Some games take hours to just grasp the rules and its first by the fourth or fifth time you're playing that they become amazing. It's like dunking on racing because a guy without license can't figure out how to change gear.
I don't have much use for mediocrity either, which is why I will always choose a flawed masterpiece over something merely competent. None of my favorite books have grabbed my attention in the first fifteen pages. Several of my favorite games took over 40 hours to become even tolerable. They made up for it by being uncommonly beautiful by the end.
A slow start is a flaw, but in my eyes a forgivable one.
MS Flight Sim comes to mind. Apparently game content is downloaded in-game, and it's in the region of 120GB, so many folk blow through 2 hours before they even get to play the game.
i had a few games that racked up hours before i even got to play anything, so i agree, this is an issue. somehow play time should not start counting until you actually get to enter the game (after character creation and any other setup that needs to be done)
The two hour rule isn't solid. I've returned a game after completing a 1 hour tutorial of the game, only to get into the main game and find out it was nothing like the tutorial lead me to believe the game was. I had to AFK during the middle of playing, so I ended up with 5 hours of gameplay. I just told them what happened, said why I wanted to refund it, and I still got it refunded. It took five hours of the game running for me to determine that I just didn't like nor enjoy it.
but they're not reliable about this either. i had a similar experience once with an RTS and i asked for a refund at the 4-5 hour mark and was told no dice.
The only angle I see is now you don't need to distribute the game data with your pirated software. let the user download the trial and apply a patch to that.
Steam already offers no questions asked refunds if a game is played for under 2 hours (and based on my experience will give refunds outside of that policy if the game won't run).
I've long believed that a market culture of releasing limited game demos increases the quality of games. If someone has the opportunity to play some section of the game they'll be able to judge the game on something other than marketing copy and curated screenshots.
> It could also end up encouraging longer "tutorial" sections at the beginning of games, which you can aggressively optimize to give players a misplaced confidence that their computers can run the game effectively.
This made me wonder about "optimizing the tutorial" for content of the game such that it actually takes the same amount of or less time to play through the rest of the game after. I wouldn't be surprised if this is attempted in some cases and it would be pretty disheartening to see it widespread.
Publishers who use denuvo won't, because that implies giving random accounts either a non-protected copy of the exe, or generating a lot of denuvo keys that get revoked after a very short time (which doesn't break it but significantly weakens it)
The first game to offer a trial is Dead Space which uses Denuvo. Game is also published by EA which would be at the tail of my list of consumer friendly publishers.
This might get me to buy more games. Let me start off by saying I'm a very casual gamer, playing only a few hours a month tops. My two friction points are the return policy, which has a 2 week limit, and the huge download sizes for games.
If I wanted to play a game, I'd have to wait a few hours to download the whole thing. I don't have Google fiber. My time to have played that game is usually gone by the time that's over and I might not get a chance to play again for another 2 or 3 weeks. Having the 90 minute trials would completely solve this problem for me.
Same here. I game in spurts where sometimes I will play a few hours a night and other times I will only fit in a couple hours a month. I have several AAA games I bought in the past that turned out to be obscenely huge downloads, and by the time I freed up enough space on my system to download them, then actually downloaded them, then started them up only to discover they didn't run on my Surface Pro anyway, the return window expired. Very annoying.
I normally pirate my games to see if they work with my setup. If they do, there's a chance I'll buy them. But having it just work with Steam is much more likely I just pay a few bucks for a game, rather than look for it on a private tracker.
With the long-standing Steam refund policy being no questions asked in first two hours play/two weeks of buying the game, the piracy step hasn't really been necessary (assuming your motivations are genuinely just compatibility checking...)? The refund policy is still more generous than this 90min demo window.
If it doesn't work, just legitimately get 100% of your money back.
Most anti-piracy software is undistinguishable from malware. In addition to that I've never got malware in years of occasional pirate playing. I might as well pay to support the devs and still play the cracked version at this point.
certain AAA companies have terms of service that allow them to harvest your web browsing data. Considering that, your malware risk might actually be less with pirated games
I'd rather say it's a PITA. And an even bigger PITA is to comply with the different rules, which vary from tracker to tracker of course. I had multiple accounts deactivated because I haven't logged in for a specific time for example.
There are different ways to get into trackers, if you want to embark on the journey. You can get an invite directly, you can buy one (against TOS, if they find out they ban you & the inviter usually), there are sometimes free registration periods, and they sometimes do cross-promotion, like if you're a member at X for a time, then you can register to Y.
For games, maybe a lesser PITA is to look for repackers. But of course, as these are on the open internet, there are clones too.
As someone who makes games this strikes me as nuts. I can easily see players enjoying their 90-minutes and leaving satisfied, why pay for more? We know from achievements and other data very few players reach a game's ending. I wager this will just encourage more sampling of games without ultimately buying a copy.
Additionally, creating a compelling 90-minute demo _on top of the game itself_ is daunting! I recently-ish created a ~30-minute demo[1] and it nearly killed me and my colleagues...
Refunds are for 'this product does not work', and they will block you from doing it if they think you are doing too many. Demos are zero consequence for the customer.
They could already refund with playtime less than 2hrs, so not sure what is your point. Also the idea here is that you don't have to create a demo, you literally just give the game to them.
You and wildrhythms are asking, "How is a demo different than refunding?"
1. A demo is a promotional product. It has to have emotional beats that culminate in strong desire for more and a call to action to "Buy now!" The unedited first X-minutes of a game is unlikely to hit those beats.
2. A demo should be like a chocolate box, filled with delightful surprises, sampling the game. The first X-minutes of your game should be like a gentle hike into the woods, easing the player into the game's setting, mechanics, etc.
3. Refunding requires purchasing then taking action to reverse course. Furthermore, that action isn't entirely comfortable for many. That is, most people are honest and don't want to abuse refunds. A demo works in the opposite manner.
According to the article, this is not a demo. This is just the first ninety minutes of the full game. So this can’t offer anything that your game itself doesn’t offer in its first ninety minutes.
Players can already just download the full game before purchase, for the majority of games people play
This is just more convenient, so it makes it more likely to convert into sales
If the game can't keep people wanting to play it more than a couple hours, and players decide they don't want to buy it anymore, they could already do that with a refund.
Making games more convenient to play always increases sales, if you think there's any chance at all that the product you're selling is worth buying.
Anecdotal, but as a kid with no money, demos were super important, and 100% of my purchases were from games whose demos I’d played. I hope your effort in making a demo has been rewarded!
> why pay for more ?
I am guessing for the "lenth of the game - 90 minutes"
From my experience as a gamer, now days between the free games on mobile, epic game store and xbox game pass, the almost infinite amount of dirt cheap games on sale at any time on steam and the "sink all you life always online: experiences like destiny, overwatch etc... etc... The main resources for games is time not money. The idea that someone would find a game that they actually enjoy and decided not to pay for it (or wait for it for a sale) i don't think is realistic.
Sure some people will sample the game, but the people who won't buy the game after sampling it are the same people who wouldn;t buy the game either way.
That may describe your patterns but it doesn't match my lived experience with a game on Steam... I added a demo and saw sales decline. I removed the demo and saw sales increase. I've heard similar stories from others.
Is it a losing strategy if the revenue increases? Consider how encouraging gambling on in-game items instead of making better games has served the mobile gaming industry.
Unfortunately the world is not just and consumer-hostile behavior often ends up being more profitable.
No, demos negatively affecting sales has been known for years now. Even studies as far back as 2013. This isn't some "your game is just bad" situation.
Besides, even if it was, it's not like developers set out to make a non-compelling game. Like woops, let me just press the "compelling" button before shipping!
Is that the value proposition of modern games? 90m of content? I don't buy many new games, but I'd have thought that there was a higher ask of a game than just getting 90m out of it.
I mean, I understand your point. My friend bought a used Mac once, and it had Sim-City on it. We hadn't seen it before and we fell into a black hole of playing it for 3 hours straight before someone accidentally kicked the plug.
"Well, that's that!" and I can attest that none of us really went back to it. It certainly kept our interest for 3 hours though.
> Is that the value proposition of modern games? 90m of content?
It's not, it's just that there's a lot of very good sales and subscription services that firehose free games at you (humble bundle). So a lot of people have hundreds of games that they don't really need to extract any value from to get their moneys worth, so they only play most of them for a few minutes if at all, only putting real time into the few games that are really good.
The games themselves don't only have 90 mins of playtime, it's just that most of the players have lots of games and not so much time to play them.
There are short story-driven experiences, but even those generally last at least a few hours (the "walking simulator" genre - I'd recommend Firewatch as a good example of that type of game).
> Is that the value proposition of modern games? 90m of content?
Why not? That sounds like a pretty sensible game length to me. I'd even say that within some genres stretching it longer only makes games worse. The current 2 hour refund policy is quite harmful for hand-crafted unique experiences created by small studios. These days nobody wants to finance short focused games. I wonder where the next Loom or Portal is supposed to come from in such environment.
I don't think the statistics are really communicating what you think they're communicating. I have hundreds of games in my steam library, a lot of which I've either not played at all or only played for like 30 mins or so.
This doesn't mean I actually want games to only have ~ an hour of playtime, it's just that they were all either very cheap or free through things like humble bundle. So I grabbed them with the intention to play them later when I feel like it and maybe messed around in them for a little bit to see if I felt like properly diving in now.
It's still absurd Steam has done nothing to the refund rule when games are around or under 2 hours long.
There are zero consequences to "buying" games like Superhot, A Short Hike, Journey, and Before Your Eyes; completing them, and refunding the game. None. They do have an abuse warning system in place, but I have never seen validation that it works for short games, just frequent refunds/odd cards used.
EA has 10 hour trials, but we haven't heard anything about how successful they are. EA likes to boast, so one can only assume it's not all that successful in getting people to actually a) stay subscribed to EA play or b) get people to buy the games. We also know generally that demos, especially for lesser known games, can negatively affect sales.
I can see publishers only supporting this for already very popular and well received games to secure every last potential sale, but everyone else has little reason to.
The refunds are not due to dissatisfaction, it's because they can. The act is closer to piracy than an angry customer.
Hot Take Edit: It's gamer Karens requesting the refunds. "I had information available to me that said the game time was under 2 hours but I bought it anyways and now I'm severely disappointed that the game was under 2 hours long and I deserve a refund!"
It's not piracy. They can't play it after they refund it and I'd call wanting to give it back because you accomplished everything you wanted in less than 2 hours a type of dissatisfaction.
Really? I'd call "accomplishing everything you wanted" satisfaction. Especially since the chances are nearly 100% that the time to complete was known prior to the purchase (at a minimum, the information was available).
I wouldn't demand a refund for a movie, for example, if it finished in 1:59. I wouldn't demand a refund for beating my friends in a round of Top Golf in an hour. Nor would I demand a refund if I decide I'm done after spending less than 2 hours in a museum.
Demand? Steam offers it. It’s about expectations. How many video game’s legitimately expect players to be completely done with it under 2 hours? If that is your target audience then maybe steam isn’t the best platform for you to sell on. I’ve never refunded a game before, but I also see no issues with this policy.
A complete story can be told in under 2 hours. Forcing developers to bloat their games for no reason other than to avoid the refund system is an absurdly idiotic suggestion.
I didn't say they had to bloat their game. They can also choose a different method of distribution. Steam takes a one size fits all approach and an overwhelming majority of the market isn't on paid games with content that lasts under 2 hours.
Users who want to game the system by adding a credit card to their Steam account, purchasing the game, finishing it in <2 hours, asking for a refund and waiting to get their money back already have a much easier option – piracy.
On the other hand treating your customers with respect and letting them try what they are buying ultimately increases sales and works out in everyone's benefit.
You make it sound complicated, it's not. Refunds are automated, buying games is easy. Piracy still involves external tools. We're talking about people already having steam accounts, refunding games they've completed just because they can. Not those who have to specifically create a new account entirely for it.
As someone who loves the occasional tight indie game that only has 2 hours of content, I agree. A game like "A short hike" couldn't exist if every game had this 2 hour policy. Hopefully its an opt-in system for game devs at the very least.
I asked for a refund recently at around 2 hours into a game, because it kept locking up. I thought it might be my computer but the internet is full of people with the same problem.
For a launch title, these things are common now. But this was a 2 year old game.
I like the idea. It would definitely make me test out more games that I'm hesitant of buying today, especially with a game library of close to 1000 games. It's crazy how you get multiple games for free each week nowadays. On the downside, I'm certain it would lower my tolerance in new games. If you buy it, you kinda need to give it a proper chance. Now you can try it for 20 minutes and just throw it away.
I'm very interested in how this interacts with Valve's standard policy of giving refunds for games you've played for less than two hours.
I suspect there will be more demo downloads, but fewer total (non-refunded) purchases with this modal. The question is where do you apply friction, before download or after 90 minutes of gameplay.
I'm also generally concerned with demo-hacking. Putting all the novelty in the first 90 minutes. Placing one large cliff hanger or achievement near the 90 minute mark. Building a starting place that takes just over 90 minutes to get out of. I do get the impression PC devs are aware of the 120 minute mark and try to make the first two hours strong. This lowers that bar.
This already happens. Most people do not complete games[0]. You can verify by checking out the achievements for various games. This already leads to games having fun beginnings but lacklustre end games
The way "achievements" have dropped in quality by any measure in the last decades should be scrutinized almost as much as lack of retained player interest.
Many people barely start games, let alone finish them. Look at achievement stats for things that happen very early on in games. You'll find achievements that happen 1-2 hours in with only 60% earn rates. I don't think it's meaningful to look at completion rate without first normalizing with the "starting" rate.
One quick example from my steam library: Terraria
- Chop down your first tree. (You can do this immediately after you start playing): 86.5%
- Craft your first work bench. (Can be done immediately after cutting a tree): 56.8%
- Survive your character's first full night (24 minutes of playtime): 78.8%
And only 25% have gotten `Champion of Terraria` which means about 2/3rds of players did not reach the "end" of the game. That is inline with the linked article which states:
> “Statistically, most players don’t finish games. We’ve all seen numbers that say something like a third [do finish games], on average," Rouse III said later in the presentation.
It's not that simple, though, either. I've played a lot of Terraria. I've never seen the moon lord. That's because it was added a long time after I played. I did beat everything that existed, but they changed the game afterward.
Obviously this isn't the case for every game but that skews the numbers too.
True. After writing my comment, I realized Terraria is not the best example for a few reasons, but it's good enough to serve my original intention. I wasn't trying to contest that a large portion of people don't finish games, just that the numbers can be deceiving if you only look at completion rates. It matters whether someone drops a game 10 minutes in vs an hour in vs 10 hours in. Not just if they completed the game.
The one difference is that Valve can choose to treat repeated refund requests from a user as abuse, and stop processing them. With a demo the intentions are clear, and there is no payment transaction at all.
Seems like a simplification of their 2-hour refund policy. On one hand it's good to not have to bother with credit card transactions and refunds at all. On the other this seems to be opt-in from the developer's side (at least for now).
I think this is an amazing idea. As long as it's not pricey it would give someone like me (not a huge diverse gamer) a chance to get real gameplay on something long enough to get an idea if I enjoy it enough.
My wife and I just started a games company after a long career in an unrelated IT field and this is awesome. Not only is it good for the consumer, it also saves the dev from having to produce a separate demo. It removes the hurdle of having to fork out the money up front and the mental anxiety of overstepping the 2 hour mark unintentionally, so more people will try new games. This is probably not going to matter much to larger productions with a large marketing budget, but it does save indies a nice chunk of time.
There is also the problem of very short and cheap games, those should probably be excluded l.
This is potentially huge - at least for me personally, there is nothing more likely to get me to buy a game, than letting me sit down and try playing it for free. I’ll even try random demos of games I don’t even think look good, because why not? Trailers are lies. Watching other people play is alright but frustrating. Getting to play yourself? There’s simply no substitute.
Expect more 2-hour cutscene fests. As a recent egregious offender Hogwarts Legacy comes to mind,; I think actual gameplay lasted around 10 minutes in the first two hours and the rest was cutscenes.
100 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadIt could also end up encouraging longer "tutorial" sections at the beginning of games, which you can aggressively optimize to give players a misplaced confidence that their computers can run the game effectively.
Therefore this doesn't really change much when it comes to realization that the game sucks very early on.
I suppose there is some small risk difference between "play 90 minutes for free, then decide to pay" vs "play 120 minutes for full game price, then get it back". But in my experience and from what I've heard over the years the refund policy is reliably honored.
I guess the demos would be better for Steam as they don't lose credit card fees.
"We will not be granting a refund at this time. The date of the purchase exceeds 2 weeks (our refund policy maximum)."
How much was the game in this anecdote?
Yea, I tried to take advantage of this when I picked up Stellaris, but that's not a game (I don't think) that you can evaluate in 2 hours. I gave it a couple of stabs, but found it just way more complex than I was interested it. I obviously played it more than 2 hours, and they wouldn't refund my money. No harm, no foul, but for some games, 2 hours isn't enough.
A slow start is a flaw, but in my eyes a forgivable one.
MS Flight Sim comes to mind. Apparently game content is downloaded in-game, and it's in the region of 120GB, so many folk blow through 2 hours before they even get to play the game.
I can see this being useful to fill up a steam cache though, depending on how it works.
> It could also end up encouraging longer "tutorial" sections at the beginning of games, which you can aggressively optimize to give players a misplaced confidence that their computers can run the game effectively.
This made me wonder about "optimizing the tutorial" for content of the game such that it actually takes the same amount of or less time to play through the rest of the game after. I wouldn't be surprised if this is attempted in some cases and it would be pretty disheartening to see it widespread.
And I had the same thought last weekend, when Diablo 4 had their Server Slam for 2 days (70 GB download).
If I wanted to play a game, I'd have to wait a few hours to download the whole thing. I don't have Google fiber. My time to have played that game is usually gone by the time that's over and I might not get a chance to play again for another 2 or 3 weeks. Having the 90 minute trials would completely solve this problem for me.
I normally pirate my games to see if they work with my setup. If they do, there's a chance I'll buy them. But having it just work with Steam is much more likely I just pay a few bucks for a game, rather than look for it on a private tracker.
If it doesn't work, just legitimately get 100% of your money back.
There are different ways to get into trackers, if you want to embark on the journey. You can get an invite directly, you can buy one (against TOS, if they find out they ban you & the inviter usually), there are sometimes free registration periods, and they sometimes do cross-promotion, like if you're a member at X for a time, then you can register to Y.
For games, maybe a lesser PITA is to look for repackers. But of course, as these are on the open internet, there are clones too.
Additionally, creating a compelling 90-minute demo _on top of the game itself_ is daunting! I recently-ish created a ~30-minute demo[1] and it nearly killed me and my colleagues...
[1]: Shameless plug https://store.steampowered.com/app/1446350/You_Will_Die_Here...
Refunds are for 'this product does not work', and they will block you from doing it if they think you are doing too many. Demos are zero consequence for the customer.
I was warned after refunding no more than about 6 games over 5 years. I'm still not sure how many are too many.
That message in the screenshot is semi common, I've got it myself. But I've never seen anyone actually have their refund permissions revoked ever.
1. A demo is a promotional product. It has to have emotional beats that culminate in strong desire for more and a call to action to "Buy now!" The unedited first X-minutes of a game is unlikely to hit those beats.
2. A demo should be like a chocolate box, filled with delightful surprises, sampling the game. The first X-minutes of your game should be like a gentle hike into the woods, easing the player into the game's setting, mechanics, etc.
3. Refunding requires purchasing then taking action to reverse course. Furthermore, that action isn't entirely comfortable for many. That is, most people are honest and don't want to abuse refunds. A demo works in the opposite manner.
This is just more convenient, so it makes it more likely to convert into sales
If the game can't keep people wanting to play it more than a couple hours, and players decide they don't want to buy it anymore, they could already do that with a refund.
Making games more convenient to play always increases sales, if you think there's any chance at all that the product you're selling is worth buying.
From my experience as a gamer, now days between the free games on mobile, epic game store and xbox game pass, the almost infinite amount of dirt cheap games on sale at any time on steam and the "sink all you life always online: experiences like destiny, overwatch etc... etc... The main resources for games is time not money. The idea that someone would find a game that they actually enjoy and decided not to pay for it (or wait for it for a sale) i don't think is realistic. Sure some people will sample the game, but the people who won't buy the game after sampling it are the same people who wouldn;t buy the game either way.
Unfortunately the world is not just and consumer-hostile behavior often ends up being more profitable.
Besides, even if it was, it's not like developers set out to make a non-compelling game. Like woops, let me just press the "compelling" button before shipping!
I mean, I understand your point. My friend bought a used Mac once, and it had Sim-City on it. We hadn't seen it before and we fell into a black hole of playing it for 3 hours straight before someone accidentally kicked the plug.
"Well, that's that!" and I can attest that none of us really went back to it. It certainly kept our interest for 3 hours though.
EDIT: forgot the 20 minutes of ads and trailers of other movies
It's not, it's just that there's a lot of very good sales and subscription services that firehose free games at you (humble bundle). So a lot of people have hundreds of games that they don't really need to extract any value from to get their moneys worth, so they only play most of them for a few minutes if at all, only putting real time into the few games that are really good.
The games themselves don't only have 90 mins of playtime, it's just that most of the players have lots of games and not so much time to play them.
There are short story-driven experiences, but even those generally last at least a few hours (the "walking simulator" genre - I'd recommend Firewatch as a good example of that type of game).
Why not? That sounds like a pretty sensible game length to me. I'd even say that within some genres stretching it longer only makes games worse. The current 2 hour refund policy is quite harmful for hand-crafted unique experiences created by small studios. These days nobody wants to finance short focused games. I wonder where the next Loom or Portal is supposed to come from in such environment.
This doesn't mean I actually want games to only have ~ an hour of playtime, it's just that they were all either very cheap or free through things like humble bundle. So I grabbed them with the intention to play them later when I feel like it and maybe messed around in them for a little bit to see if I felt like properly diving in now.
There are zero consequences to "buying" games like Superhot, A Short Hike, Journey, and Before Your Eyes; completing them, and refunding the game. None. They do have an abuse warning system in place, but I have never seen validation that it works for short games, just frequent refunds/odd cards used.
EA has 10 hour trials, but we haven't heard anything about how successful they are. EA likes to boast, so one can only assume it's not all that successful in getting people to actually a) stay subscribed to EA play or b) get people to buy the games. We also know generally that demos, especially for lesser known games, can negatively affect sales.
I can see publishers only supporting this for already very popular and well received games to secure every last potential sale, but everyone else has little reason to.
Hot Take Edit: It's gamer Karens requesting the refunds. "I had information available to me that said the game time was under 2 hours but I bought it anyways and now I'm severely disappointed that the game was under 2 hours long and I deserve a refund!"
I wouldn't demand a refund for a movie, for example, if it finished in 1:59. I wouldn't demand a refund for beating my friends in a round of Top Golf in an hour. Nor would I demand a refund if I decide I'm done after spending less than 2 hours in a museum.
On the other hand treating your customers with respect and letting them try what they are buying ultimately increases sales and works out in everyone's benefit.
For a launch title, these things are common now. But this was a 2 year old game.
I suspect there will be more demo downloads, but fewer total (non-refunded) purchases with this modal. The question is where do you apply friction, before download or after 90 minutes of gameplay.
I'm also generally concerned with demo-hacking. Putting all the novelty in the first 90 minutes. Placing one large cliff hanger or achievement near the 90 minute mark. Building a starting place that takes just over 90 minutes to get out of. I do get the impression PC devs are aware of the 120 minute mark and try to make the first two hours strong. This lowers that bar.
---
0: https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/03/17/gdc-most-players-don...
One quick example from my steam library: Terraria
- Chop down your first tree. (You can do this immediately after you start playing): 86.5%
- Craft your first work bench. (Can be done immediately after cutting a tree): 56.8%
- Survive your character's first full night (24 minutes of playtime): 78.8%
> “Statistically, most players don’t finish games. We’ve all seen numbers that say something like a third [do finish games], on average," Rouse III said later in the presentation.
Note: I do not play terraria and am assuming moon lord is the end game boss from here: https://terraria.fandom.com/wiki/Moon_Lord
Obviously this isn't the case for every game but that skews the numbers too.
Customer friendly policies and programs are absolutely worth rewarding. I have a wallet, and I might as well vote with it!
When a customer refunds a game, steam keeps its 30% cut. This lets players try games without punishing the developer by making them pay that 30%
I suspect anyway
There is also the problem of very short and cheap games, those should probably be excluded l.