The humble game demo has been on a steady decline since the PS4 and Xbox One debuted back in 2013, pushed out of the spotlight in favor of pre-release beta tests and free weekends for older titles. But it looks like one consolemaker didn’t get the memo, as Nintendo has been doing their best to bring the demo back. And I for one couldn’t be happier.
Software makers have experimented with trial versions since the very beginning of the home computing boom, but they really took off in the gaming space thanks to the shareware model employed by id Software and Apogee Software in the early 90s. By breaking their games up into episodes and releasing the first one for a very low price (or oftentimes free), the two companies (and many others like them) were able to hook in a new generation of PC players that were ready to move beyond Mario and into the dark worlds of Doom and Rise of the Triad.
In addition to being able to purchase shareware at your favorite game retailer, many games were also distributed through online bulletin board systems and early websites. But consoles like the PSone, PS2, and Xbox were ill-equipped to download and store the files needed to let players try before they buy… so thus was born the demo disc.
At least twice a year, Sony would bundle together a batch of new demos to create the next volume in the PlayStation Underground Jampack series, while Microsoft would do the same for their Xbox Exhibition series. And both consolemakers made sure to secure demos of the biggest games, including Gran Turismo, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Final Fantasy VII, Halo: Combat Evolved, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and many others.
Nintendo mostly avoided this era of the game demo due to the impracticality of producing demos for the cartridge-based Nintendo 64 and the proprietary discs used with the GameCube.
Microsoft discontinued the Xbox Exhibition series after the launch of the Xbox 360 and encouraged all publishers to move their demos to the Xbox Live Marketplace. This strategy quickly culminated in the “Bringing It Home” campaign ahead of E3 2006. Partnering with Capcom, Microsoft gave Xbox 360 owners the chance to play the same demo for Lost Planet: Extreme Condition that E3 attendees got to play.
“Bringing It Home” was a huge success, and it helped make Lost Planet a blockbuster when it was released in January 2007. Microsoft was so pleased that they continued to fill the Xbox Live Marketplace with demos over the years and even repeated the “Bringing It Home” campaign during E3 2007 (with demos for Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation, Blue Dragon, and NCAA Football 08) and E3 2008 (with demos for Tales of Vesperia and Too Human).
For the most part, demos disappeared after that. But now they’re back… and its all thanks to Nintendo.
It’s fair to say that the Wii U was not well-received by the gaming community. Nintendo sold less than 14 million Wii U consoles over the platform’s entire life, a particularly dismal showing for a console with such a fantastic library of titles.
Nintendo wasn’t used to being forgotten and they needed a way to reintroduce themselves to console gamers everywhere ahead of the Switch’s launch in March 2017. They went about that with a twofold strategy that began with a lot of Wii U re-releases and continued with a steady stream of game demos to keep Switch owners abreast of what was coming soon.
The quirky co-op puzzler Snipperclips was one of the first Switch games to get a demo. Nintendo followed that up with trial versions of many of their second-tier titles, including Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, Arms, and Pokemon: Let’s Go Pikachu!/Pokemon: Let’s Go Eevee! They also pulled in third-parties like Capcom (Mega Man 11), Bandai Namco (Katamari Damacy Reroll), and Square Enix (Octopath Traveler) to promote their Switch titles to equally impressive success.
More than three dozen demos are currently available to download through the Nintendo eShop (not counting time-limited trials like the Daemon X Machina demo that appeared around the beginning of the year). These titles are mostly on the smaller side, but they slot neatly into multiple different genres, giving every gamer something they might want to try out. And just last week, Nintendo and Square Enix teamed up to add a free Dragon Quest Builders 2 demo to the eShop.
Aside from Redbox kiosks and GameFly (and, believe it or not, your local public library), it’s almost impossible to try out a new game before buying it. All the video stores have been shuttered and I can’t remember the last time I saw a game shop with a rental wall. With this low-cost all but gone from the day-to-day experience of the average, Nintendo’s desire to make demos available to download is even more admirable. Gaming is (and always has been) an expensive hobby, so anything that takes the sting out of that is welcome and important.
Thanks to Nintendo’s demo push, I was able to see for myself just how good Snipperclips and Octopath Traveler are. I also discovered that Arms was fairly enjoyable, but not really for me. While I personally wound up passing on Arms, it’s found a decent-sized audience in the two years since its release. Would those players have taken a chance on this unproven fighting game without being able to try it out first? Maybe… but I think it’s great that games have a chance to speak for themselves on the Nintendo eShop.
So keep the demos coming Nintendo! I’m thrilled that I can try new games without spending a dime and searching out new demos is a great (and wallet-friendly) excuse to regularly check the virtual shelves of the Nintendo eShop.
