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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

Hello My Friend, Stay awhile and Listen :D

But the first question that springs to my mind when I was reading the web page, what happened to Shareware? 30 days trial.

We used to have games that we could play a little to decide whether we want to buy it. Now it is like a money bet hoping for the best.

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Maybe it's a cultural shift, that is, people can get information about a game - reviews, etc - a lot more and easier than back then when you depended on just the right issue of gaming magazines. Alternatively, the best you had was looking at the back of a game's box to get the gist of it.

But with shareware you often went in blind, especially once CD-ROMs became a thing (attached to magazines) with dozens if not hundreds of shareware games and applications. The culture was one of browsing and trying stuff out.

Nowadays it's more about being able to build up hype and brand / name awareness over time, with peak moments being e.g. the E3 conference. More recent even is streaming on Twitch and let's plays on youtube, allowing people to see the game before buying it themselves. And of course there's free-to-play or low cost games with in game purchases and/or live services.

I don't find reviews to be a substitute for demos; there's always a strong element of "if you like games like this then..."

I pretty much only buy Steam games on sale now, not (just) because I'm a skinflint, but because I've learned the expensive way that I'll uninstall most games within half an hour or so or starting them. Even well-reviewed ones. Even ones that won Game Of The Year.

Are you sure you like video games?

Well, I've been playing them for about 35 years now, so pretty sure.

Of course, obvious side-effects of advanced fogeydom include having less free time, being harder to impress with novelty, and losing the reflexes needed for some genres.

"Liking video games" is like "liking books". Typically people prefer certain kinds of games or books, and may find any particular example enjoyable or not.

Nobody questions whether I "like books" when I say The Lost World was a lackluster sequel to Jurassic Park, right? Because there is no expectation that somebody who enjoyed one particular book should like every book, even within the same genre or franchise.

I was referring to mrec's behavior of returning most games he buys, including critically-acclaimed ones. That's not a case of disliking a certain work, but of either not knowing your own taste or disliking the medium itself.

Or possibly, he knows his taste very well and is extremely selective. Some people may only be willing to invest serious time into games that fit their tastes close-to-perfectly.

I wager you don't like most critically acclaimed books, but that certainly doesn't mean you dislike books. Rather, it's just a reflection of the fact that there is such wide variety of books that anybody is unlikely to like most of them.

Sure, but I like most of the critically acclaimed books that I buy, which is more analogous to mrec's comment.

This seems like a loaded question -- do you mean to imply that to "like video games" you must like "all video games" including inherently broken and ones that promise the world in tech demo/e3 while delivering garbage on release date?

Just because one "likes books" does not mean that they should be forced to suffer gleefully through turds like Dr. Phil's "Self Matters".

As above, I was referring to mrec's behavior of returning most games he buys, including critically-acclaimed ones. That's not a case of disliking a certain work, but of either not knowing your own taste or disliking the medium itself.

I don't return them (except in cases of technical brokenness or blatant false advertising), I just stop playing them.

And I don't quite understand why "reviews not covering the aspects of a game which determine my enjoyment of it" means I don't know my own taste.

Tons of reviews are bought and paid for by the games' publishers.

We see things like "10/10" in magazines for mediocre AAA games.

I really only trust user-generated reviews from Steam and GoG to be impartial. Console gaming is a crapshoot.

Dunkey presented a fairly well-argued idea why major publications tend to give 9+/10 reviews to games, even when the actual text of their review clearly points to major issues (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG2dXobAXLI).

The tl;dw version is that gamers, by and large, tend to disparage media outlets for giving poor ratings to games that aren't already widely disliked by the hive mind. It comes from the perspective of someone who does unbiased VG reviews, and I think it raises an interesting point that might otherwise be overlooked. (Of course, payola should certainly not be discounted as a factor.)

Now that you can download the full game from steam and return it for a full refund, who would prefer to play the demo? That said, you can find all kinds of demos in console stores.

Blizzard in particular had the "spawn" option, which was more like a demo that you got directly from a friend who had the game. It also allowed you to play multiplayer with just the original CD Key owner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spawn_installation

That was a great feature. The Command & Conquer series by Westwood allowed something similar, since either disc (GDI/NOD or Allies/Soviets) contained the full installer and executable. This allowed both players in a head to head network game to run from the CDs.

You could even both play half the game in single player and then swap discs, but I'm not sure that really was the intention.

Blizz still has it with 'starter editions'. There's free to play soaking up a lot of people that would want that business model. A lot of people that care about what they're going to buy ahead of time get involved in predictions about the quality of the product and they will back them in early access. Steam frequently has 'free weekends' for games, so you can play it over the weekend. Also steam has a 2 hour or less window for refunding games you have bought.

And of course there's always piracy.

The business models have kind of exploded and it really depends on what kind of game you are talking about.

As a relatively ancient gamer with fond memories of shareware, I think it was the right solution for that time, but the time has passed. Remember that with shareware, distribution was often literal “sharing” of physical copies - almost all shareware I played came from clones of friend’s 3.5inch floppies. If you liked the game enough you often phoned the company to get the full game. This organic sharing process was critical to the shareware model at that time in an age when few household computers were connected to a network of any kind.

Now with widespread internet access shareware as physical distribution just doesn’t matter anymore, and we have a wealth of ways to determine if a game will be something you like - countless review sites, YouTube, Reddit, etc, etc.

Shareware arguably just doesn’t work all that well either in such a crowded modern gaming marketplace. There are thousands upon thousands of indie releases every year now, compared to the relatively trickle we got in the peak shareware days. With the extensive support tail modern software typically has (no more ship it and it’s done really, especially with network features...) the large number of players who would never upgrade to the paid version would still be a significant expense to support in many cases too. Commander Keen never had to worry himself with online cheat patches...

I think a much more convincing argument can be made that the shareware business evolved into the F2P nonsense we have now - it’s like shareware but without the hurdle of extracting money by a traditional up front price that better fits, rightly or wrongly, the current consumer expectations of software pricing.

I think if you take into account sales and inflation games are just cheaper now so it's less if a big deal. Also with all the reviews and twitch streams it's super easy to get a ton of information about a game.

Edit: I'll generally read reviews for games and if it's interesting I'll watch people play it. That combo has been similarly effective to demos for me.

It became in-game purchases. Shareware was v1 of the model, and a very blunt instrument. It's evolved into free-to-play with paid upgrades, which is very much alive.

Do you how bad it was if you rented a bad game from blockbuster? The cover looked sweet but the game was terrible. God forbid you actually bought a cool looking game from Toys R’ Us only to find out it was trash.

Today is a much better time. I can go to YouTube or other places to actually see gameplay before I buy. I used to have to buy GamePro and read to figure things out.

> what happened to Shareware?

I think it's partly due to the massive drop in software prices (even a high end game can be had for $20-$30 if you catch it on a Steam sale, compared with $85+ in y2k dollars) so people just buy the software. Also many online stores have very liberal return policies so some people buy-then-refund just to try things out.

That price drop never came to Australia.

When I was a kid, triple-A games were around $80.

Now triple A-games start from $80, with special editions costing more.

Every now and then I see a sale on a game I'd been meaning to buy, but when I go to purchase, I see the base game for $40, and the 'full game' $70 (down from $100-$120).

The parent meant inflation adjusted. $50 US 20 years ago are equivalent to almost $80 today, but game prices have not increased at the same rate (they mostly stayed the same nominal price at launch but sales and heavy discounts are much more common).

Editions that actually come with all the content, including the stuff they held back to trickle it out over the next ~3-6mo, usually are more like $80-100 at launch. That seems to be how they've (the game companies) dealt with inflation. But yeah if you game way behind the times and don't do the latest hot multiplayer games, like I do then you rarely pay more than $30 for a game, average probably closer to $15-20 for non-indie games (lower for those, of course).

Stop buying from EB Games then! :P

I haven't bought a game from a bricks-and-mortar store since Diablo 3 came out.

TIL that EB Games is still a thing in Oz.

Before they were all converted to GameStops here (USA), as a joke I used to call the chain "Mo-B Games" because of the resemblance of the E in the logo to katakana 'mo' (モ).

We also had the world's second-last standing Blockbuster until earlier this year. :P

> The parent meant inflation adjusted

AU$80 in 2000 -> AU$128.38 in 2019

> Stop buying from EB Games then

Steam: Buy Call of Duty: WWII - Digital Deluxe. Released almost 2 years ago. 99,99€ = AU$163.42 (I'm in Europe at the moment. Anyone got an Australian price on this to prove me wrong?)

You can count the 2 hour no questions asked refund policy of Steam as demos, I guess.

Yes, I suspect that plays a part at least within the context of Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds

My understanding is that companies have stopped doing shareware or demos because they sell less copies when shareware/demo is available. With a demo, only people that really like the game will buy it. Without a demo, anybody that wants to even try it needs to buy it.

Completely depends on the game. Great games lead to more sales -- mediocre/crap leads to less.

It's not the same thing, but you can buy a game from steam and return it if you didn't like it. They accept it without questions if you return it in like 7 days after purchase.

If you do it too much they'll block refunds on your account though. It's not intended as a demo of the software.

I haven't been gaming for a while now, but on my Xbox 360 I could download a demo, test the game for a bit and then decide to buy it or not. I have used that quite a lot.

Steam has free to play where a drm enabled game is available for free to play for a weekend. I imagine the other download clients offer the same format as well.

Something like this, I'd guess: https://youtu.be/7QM6LoaqEnY

Demos are still common; e.g. Steam has around ~3000.

If it's 3000 on all the Steam games (~ 30k), I'd say that they are not common. And they are also very uncommon for big release.

Perhaps they just got replaced by youtube "let's plays"?

They got replaced by videos of the games in action (as opposed to the specific "let's play" genre). The screenshots + description + a video + reviews informs me about most games on STEAM.

A random game I have up in my queue on steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1101660/Cooking_Trip_Back...

Do you really need a demo?

I actually think the early-access model is similar in spirit if players can get a decent cut in price (say at least 25% off).

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