All over Twitch, about half the streamers I usually watch playing turn-based strategy games are all suddenly playing the same new game. I watched a few streams, and it looked interesting. Normally, I never buy games when they just come out because I have such a backlog and can wait for a sale, but I figured if everyone (figuratively) is playing it, it must be amazing.
Turns out, they’re giving the full game away for free during their “early access” phase as a “demo”. But it’s the full game, just with only 2 class choices.
I had a blast! And now I’m probably going to buy it on release.
The last time I remember doing this was for Minecraft. I see lots of games doing free weekends on Steam, which is very similar; doesn’t work well for me since I only have a few hours for gaming each week, but I imagine that must be successful for a lot of games, too.
What do you think of that business model? And/or, what do you think of Backpack Battles, if you’ve played it?
I mean … Valve has an extremely reliable 2 hours or 2 weeks policy which is good enough for most games IMO. I’ve rarely needed more than that in terms of a demo to gauge whether I want to keep something or not
And that’s great for you, but I have a family, and sometimes I have to pause a game, and that means those two hours can go up quick. Demos are inclusive to people like me.
I guess that’s fair, but a lot of games also have “save anywhere” kind of saves where you can just close the game. Or they’re “there is no pause button” games.
I guess we’re just two kinds of gamers though.