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[Mar Sara]

I just purchased this game today! loving it so far. But to confess my sins, I played the tutorial last night before actually purchasing... I have limited funds, and will have instant noodles for dinner the next three days to balance my budget XD as such I'm carefull of what games I splurge on, and only buy games I find the opportunity to try first. It seems this isn't an uncommon story either.
 Anyway, I was just wondering if a demo mode is planned for this game at all? It'd be nice to enable it to reach more players, I can think of some people I'd certainly recommend it to.  Has anyone heard anything about a demo mode in the future? Any thoughts for or against this idea?

[xenoargh]

Demo modes are one of the things Mount and Blade used to increase sales initially. However, I think the problem here is largely maintenance; any "demo" that actually showed much of the game would be the game, frankly.

I think that, at the current price, "just buy it, you'll be happy you did" is fair

[goduranus]

I think demos aren't a thing any more in general, cuz people go to YouTube or Twitch to see what a game feels like before they buy nowadays.

[Limitless]

What Sseth did basically made this whole release a demo version. I wouldn't be too surprised if this version of the game was kept around purely as a demo in the future

[DaLagga]

The game did have a demo at one point.  If you searched around enough I'm sure you could probably still find it.  It's actually how I first played the game but that was back in 2012 I believe. 

In any case, I don't see why a new demo would be hard to do or even require any significant extra work.  The demo could simply be the full game except that your character is locked after 1 hour of play.  You can create as many characters as you want but not play them any more than an hour.  That way people would get hooked and want to see more.  Buying the game would then just remove the lockout and allow you to continue your characters. 

[Modo44]

It's 2019, you can torrent virtually any game to demo it. Just do as expected: buy if you still like it a couple of hours in.

[Midnight Kitsune]

It's 2019, you can torrent virtually any game to demo it. Just do as expected: buy if you still like it a couple of hours in.

Some people don't like pirating games at all. Also, please don't talk about that on the forums

[Alex]

Removed off-topic/against the rules discussion from thread, please keep it on-topic.

Discussing piracy is indeed against the forum rules.

Public discussion of piracy, imo, normalizes it, and that's not something I want to contribute to, hence the rule. The only time someone gets a pass is if the post is of the "I pirated then bought it" variety. I usually try to mention that talking about piracy is against the forum rules when this happens, as well, but have been admittedly lax about that lately - duly noted.

Please note that publicly talking about moderator decisions is also against the rules, which includes this - let's keep this on-topic.

@Grievous69: you've got a PM.

[CommandoDude]

Demo modes are one of the things Mount and Blade used to increase sales initially. However, I think the problem here is largely maintenance; any "demo" that actually showed much of the game would be the game, frankly.

I think that, at the current price, "just buy it, you'll be happy you did" is fair

You could have the demo be the tutorial mission and that would basically be enough to hook 90% of people who are interested.

[Mar Sara]

You could have the demo be the tutorial mission and that would basically be enough to hook 90% of people who are interested.

I think this would be great! Someone letting me play the tutorial is what got me to buy the game. Maybe just don't even run the rest of the sector generation if the games's not registered. Or force save quit when entering H-space.

But in the end, if it happens it happens. I'll hope for a new demo and try to find the old one somewhere. I have a list of people I want to send this game to, so if I can find that old file that'd be cool

[mvp7]

Mount & Blade beta had a pretty smart system where you could play until level 10 before the character would be locked and you would need to buy the game to continue. It worked really well back in the day, making M&B one of the pioneers of modern indie development.

It avoids the problem of having to maintain a separate Demo branch of the game. Increased cost from downloads by people who haven't actually bought the game would be the major downside but even that could be mitigated by adding torrent as preferred official distribution method with direct downloads being a secondary method.

[Demonocolips]

well if there is still an old version of the game floating around just remove the keylock. like release an older unupdated version of the game maybe a stable build from 5 or so years ago. no additional work needs to be done and people get a decent look at the game.

[Mar Sara]

@Demonocolips
Off topic and gainst the forum rules. piracy is not discussing a demo new or old. They are not equivalent things, regardless of how outdated. Please see the post by Alex a bit above yours.

[Alex]

I think he was suggesting that *I* do that, not you. At least, I hope so

[mvp7]

Using old version of game for demo is generally not a great idea. Demo should show the game at its best and and some old version might actually have the opposite to desired effect on interested people.

Before it was on Steam, Kerbal Space Program used to have a demo version that lagged badly behind the latest releases. When I first saw the game on youtube I downloaded the demo and showed it to a friend as well.

The friend was not impressed in the slightest as the demo version was little more than a vertical rocket launching tech demo. He only got interested in the game after he saw the latest versions with stuff like orbital mechanics and other planets on youtube and ended up playing the game even more than I did. All that outdated demo did was almost drive away a future customer.