Foreword: I wrote this piece back in November last year to accompany a job application I made to a well known video game magazine and I'm posting it now verbatim, which is why it's a little out of date. I was going to expand on it, but it gave me an idea for another post altogether, so will work on that instead.


The headline “Peter Molyneux Hates Demos” exploded across gaming blogs last month after the new creative director of Microsoft Game Studios in Europe sat down with Edge to discuss Lionhead’s decision to release Fable II on Xbox Live in five episodes. As comment boards across the blogosphere rushed to the defence of game demos with adolescent sarcasm, I couldn’t help but feel that they had largely missed the point.



Molyneux described demos as “the death knell of experiences” and I agree that sometimes demos don’t properly represent a game’s core mechanics well enough to offer the gamer a unified experience. Consequently they don’t enjoy it and so they don’t buy it. Molyneux’s bold experiment is to take a game which is already wholly developed and offer it to consumers in episodes, allowing the consumer to purchase additional content as they progress into the game. Lionhead need only break the game into chunks and work out the finer details of delivery.

Despite the simplicity of the idea, episodic gaming has a poor track record, where the promise of smaller, more frequent updates gave way to the reality of infrequent larger updates. As much as I loved Half Life 2 back in 2004, it’s been a clear two years since Episode 2 and details of Episode 3 are still thin on the ground. With even less success, SiN Episodes had the admirable intention of releasing an episode that comprised of six hours of gameplay every six months, but since the release of the first episode in May 2006 all development on future episodes has ceased. In the meantime, the core concept has morphed into the far more successful guise of downloadable content, with Fallout 3 and GTAIV being notable titles to carry quality episodic expansions.

So Molyneux’s hatred of demos is reasonable when you consider that they perform an unreliable promotional role. They fill the gap left between previews, reviews and actually buying the physical product and playing it yourself. I can’t think of a demo that I’ve played which has made me want to buy the whole game, but I’ve played plenty of demos for games I already knew I wanted to get, and in some cases the demo was enough to convince me otherwise. So while they can be counter-productive, demos remain enduringly popular because they give eager fanboys who are drunk on hype the chance to taste a game ahead of the release date. Savvy developers then attach these blockbuster demos and betas to otherwise anonymous games, giving such titles a hefty sales boost on the back of a ‘free’ demo.

Molyneux’s new vision for demos in a modern content delivery service is reliant on the flexibility and scalability of online services like Steam and Xbox Live. I can imagine turning on my machine, choosing to play any game on the market and at a certain point in proceedings, paying to unlock further sections of the game. When a game like Fable II is offered in this way, it’s not so much episodic as incremental. Its merit is that I pay only for the content of the game I actually consume, and should I lose interest in it, I haven’t paid full whack to play half a game.

As a concept, it’s more evolutionary than revolutionary - being a conceptual mash-up of shareware, retro coin-ops, episodic gaming and downloadable content. The convenience comes from having that fatband, always-on, datapipe pumping gigabytes into your living room, like the technological soothsayers always predicted. Infinium Labs attempted to provide just that back in 2002 with their appropriately named Phantom game system, before disappearing six years later having failed to bring the product to market. It was always going to be the heavyweights who finally created the infrastructure to provide content in this manner, as it serves their interests to short-circuit piracy, and strip games of their resale value.

If I were cynical, I would say that Lionhead’s decision to give away the first episode of the game is a demo by any other name, but despite Molyneux’s propensity for aggrandised assertions, it might just work. As an experiment in selling games incrementally to the end user, it’s the kind of ambition I’ve come to expect from Molyneux, and provides a genuine glimpse of the future of digital distribution. I will have to sit this one out however, because I’ve already bought Fable II, played it, and flipped it on eBay, all without once playing a demo.