Bethesda had all sorts of announcements at its E3 press conference on June 12, and among them was the announcement that the recently released DOOM would be getting a demo, which is now available on Steam.
Honestly, this is a good thing. The demo will allow people who are still on the fence about buying the new DOOM to actually get a chance to the play the game (if they don't have a friend who will let them) before taking the monetary plunge and buying the game themselves. However, the announcement — as well as the demo to a certain extent — is pretty depressing.
The first reason for this feeling of depression comes from Bethesda's description of the demo. The company says the demo is meant to be in the spirit of shareware demos that were popular on the PC in the early-to-mid '90s. However, this demo falls short of that in multiple aspects, with the most important of them being that unlike shareware from that era (which is essentially available forever), the DOOM demo is only available for a week.
In addition, the demo falls short of the expectations of shareware in another way which is quite significant: content. The DOOM demo will only feature the very first level of the game and leave players to determine if they want to buy the game based on that brief experience.
This is such a far cry from the shareware back in the '90s - which Doom creators id Software itself was a huge participant of - that it's almost comical. Though to understand why, a brief history lesson is in order.
Back in the '90s, shareware in the form of floppies, bulletin board downloads and magazine cover discs was huge. Apogee Software was one of the companies that led the charge in making shareware mainstream, and id Software jumped onboard soon after and offered the first third of the original for free.
There are still many who have only played the first third of the game thanks to shareware, while there are others who wound up getting the rest of the game for free through a similar method. Overall, however, there were more who flat out bought the full game thanks to that shareware. Yes, the system was abusable, but it was one that worked in the end.
Now, fast forward to yesterday's announcement and we have two very different scenarios: the original Doom, which has the first third of the game available forever, and the new DOOM, which has the first level of the game available for a week (let's not forget that the game has already been out for a month either).
Technicalities aside, there is another, far more simple reason as to why the announcement was depressing: it happened at all.
It really says something about the state of the industry as a whole when one of the highlights for one of the most well-liked companies in the business, in the most important event for the industry in the year, is to announce that it's releasing a demo for a game that has been out for a month now.
Of course, this isn't a knock on id Software or Bethesda - they're miles ahead of others in the industry by coming out with a demo at all. It used to be commonplace for games up to the mid-2000s to get demos in order to convince a prospective buyer to purchase the full product. Now, more often than not, they're expected to do the same with little to go on beyond an interview or several brief trailers.
In the end, what's really depressing is that demos are so uncommon that Bethesda felt the need to announce one for a game that is already out, liken it to shareware (which it doesn't even come close to) and expect fans to get excited. Even worse is that because of the way things are now, there are actually few reasons to be.
