The conventional wisdom...

[Roulette]

I thought that this might be interesting to some people...

The conventional wisdom is that the hour-long demo is the optimal way to maximize your sales. I've heard this from several different portals, and in a couple of cases they've actually stated that they did testing to determine the best method.

We have never time-limited our games, and we've been seeing some interesting results. Roughly 20% of our sales now come from downloads that happened 2+ months ago. A few percent actually come from downloads that are more than four months old.

I have no way of knowing how many sales would have occurred had a time limit been in place, but I doubt that any such tests done by the major portals (to determine that the hour-long limit was optimal) still collected data months later. If that's true, then their data would have been skewed towards the hour-long demo since many of the purchases that would have occurred as a result of the unlimited time demo would not have happened within their testing period.

- Roulette

[DavidRM]

That's not the "conventional wisdom". It's just what the portals came up with and forced on developers.

They apply it in almost all cases, regardless of whether that method works best for a given game. Sort of like the $19.95 "standard price".

The one-size-fits-all solution doesn't exist. Maybe the portals will figure that out someday.

-David

[Diodor Bitan]

That's what I've seen too - the Regnow cookie based affiliate sales track time since the cookie was set. Sales dating a month or more back are quite common.

I thought that the conventional wisdom was that different games respond better to different kinds of limitations. The portals may get away with their choice because
1) Their games are similar in some ways
2) Their customers know what to expect when downloading a demo so they are more likely to do so.

[Coyote]

The big portals use the "Spray and Pray" method of delivering content. They don't care about any PARTICULAR game selling to its best potential - they are looking for the cheapest and easiest way to sell the most products overall. Since their audience is focused more on simple, highly replayable games, the time limit generally works best. So they make that the general rule.

Based on discussions here and on the old Dexterity forums, it seems that if you have a game that's more content-and-feature oriented, feature-limiting seems to work better.

I did both at the same time, which may have granted me the worst of both worlds. I'm learning that creating a demo that sells the game is definitely an art form rather than a science.

[JoeMaru]

Portals set a one hour limit because the people who use the portals to play games get a consistent (read: comfortable) experience.. same way that whenever you go to McD's, it tastes the same.

The idea that it is 'optimal' for all games is crock of shit.

[Rainer Deyke]

Time limiting works really well for the portals because the player is likely to download another game when the first one expires. If a player plays one demo for two months, then that's two months in which the portal isn't selling their other games to that player.

[svero]

This was discussed at length in some other threads...

Here are two I found...
http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=516
http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=4

I had another thread where I posted some experiment results from space taxi 2 where the unlimited untimed demo was selling about 4x the 1hr version, but I can't find it now.

[Jack Norton]

I believe that you need some limitation to the game otherwise the player can just play for free. I am not making casual games of course :)
UBM has a time limit of 25 minutes. But you can virtually restart how many times you want.
My other games have a match limit. GK let you play 7 matches then it stops. Apart for that is fully functional.
I think the best solution is never put a time limit to the game, but limit access to some features (for example in UBM demo you can't hire other boxers) and let player play with the cropped version forever if they want.
The 1 h play may do well for portal games... ah well they're all identical to me :D

[Itsme]

I know it sounds cheesey (by the way, how do you spell that?) but business highly irrational. I recommend you read Jay Abraham to get some fresh ideas about marketing.
The theory goes that if there is a scarcity factor, the sales do increase. Which is totally true - tried and tested. But games are way competitive. You've invested all that time and effort into promoting your game. I've been lucky to get a few hundred people (of a few thousands) to visit your site. About 30% of them downloaded your game. And after all that hard work you are ready to say - OK folks, you had the game for one hour, now make up your mind.
Here is the dilemma - most people who try games are NEVER going to buy them. There is NOTHING you can do to convert them. So, effectively, the one hour technique is used to discourage the non-buyers. And it works. But it does not mean this is what you have to do. Only if you are afraid that people will get bored with your game.
I say if you worked so hard to get the game to the desktop, why make a person delete it after one hour? Does not make any sense. I like how ThinkTanks have done it - the game has a 10 minute limit for each combat. The more I play, the more I like the game. My buddy already bought a copy for himself and I'll probably get a copy for myself too. But, with so many other games (including some very good ones), as soon as they are no longer functional - they get uninstalled. And I never think about them twice. This is just my opinion. I happen to read a lot of Jay Abraham and Gary Halbert and these guys who have 30+ years in direct marketing really show that people's decisions arre highly irrational. Do you know that proloning money back guarantee actually decreases the number of refunds (at least with info products)?

[Itsme]

Why the hell to I write "I" when I mean "You". Too much beer perhaps?

[Sparks]

Maybe these "experiences" in some way are also not set in stone, maybe this whole art and science also is subject to changes ?
People change the way they act based on experiences, too.
Obviously there is not the perfect solution to this, and that is why its called risky business :)
Valve have yet to prove that Steam is *they* way of selling games.
WarCraft 3 and other games have outsold HL2 by far, yet "all" the used was registration codes, not something as embarassing as Steam.
Halo2 has outsold HL2 by far, even though games for the XBox can be cracked and copied, too.
So maybe, at the end of the day, if Your game is just good enough, You can choose from any restricting method and still have a winner ?
The golden rule was always that a game needs to grab the player within the first minutes of gameplay, be it through style, story, humour, character, whatever.
If thats the case with Your game, then You probably don't need to restrict the player at all, because playing itself is already attracting enough.
But I still favour the restriction of levels/progress in the game, instead of a time limit.

[James C. Smith]

As I have posted in other threads, I personally believe that time limiting is the optimal way to sell my games. It may not work for every game, and each game may need a different time limit, but time limiting is a great option for many games. For me, this has nothing to do with all the shot gun “spray and pray” McDonalds BS many people mentioned here. There are specific reasons I think it is better than level limiting. You can read about them in the other threads.

The point I wanted to make here is Yes I do track sales for several months after the download. Many people who downloaded my 60 minute demo ended up purchasing it months later. This is not uncommon at all.

[JoeMaru]

The point is that how you approach your demo is specific to your game. Limiting of some form or another is a good idea.. but the one hour time limit is not the best appraoch for all games.

We had a one hour time limit and no feature limit forced upon us by real arcade, and the conversion rate for that version was way less then our feature limited (but not time limited) version. The Shockwave version was time limited and feature limited, and the conversion rate was similar to the non time limited version. Granted, the difference in conversion rate might be due to the different audiences on the different portals, but using the 'real' approach did not give us anything extra in terms of increasing sales.

Sorry if I sounded a little grumpy in my last response.. I had to sit through the spiel of how 'at real arcade, we have found that this approach we use increases sales... yada yada yada' - more than once.. and I know it is a bunch of baloney and the company line they train theri producers with.

The 'conventional wisdom' is not wisdom at all.. just people jumping on what worked for others without checking to see if it works for their game. Track your sales and conversion rate and see what is the most effective for your game and your audience.

[arcadetown]

Personally think both time and feature limit is best for most games, very few are exceptions. One portal had us time limit in our BLOX Forever and CR was bad as people could play through too many levels in 1 hour so the remaining full version levels looked like less of a good deal. Conversly the 1 hour limit is good to get fence sitters off the fence and buying. So combining both level and time limit our sales here have increased.

Joe, was interesting you saw similar results with Shockwave as your version. Figure Shockwave has a more mass market audience and lower CRs so perhaps this demonstrates that both limits worked better?

[Omega]

I don't think Valve is trying to prove anything. They just felt like selling a package for 59.95 using Steam and making the 59.95 of the money. Why sell retail and make a $15 profit per copy after the publisher, middle-man, distributor, and the store take their cut?

There is no conclusion you can draw from Steam. Actually, buying it online was painless. The games just appear in your Steam account.

Buying the game from Walmart and trying to activate it was a pain, from what I heard. But isn't that a POSITIVE for Steam, not a negative :) That's what you get for buying a game in a store, right? :)

[Anthony Flack]

While certainly different games are better suited to different methods, I have a feeling that generally, time limiting may work if your game already has a lot of exposure; a fairly generous, non-time limited demo is probably better for people who have a good game but no established audience.

Hence, I'm going for a non-time limited, fairly generous demo. I'm willing to sacrifice sales for more exposure, since I think getting good exposure should be my top concern.