Think about this – when was the last time you’ve seen a plain old game demo? Not a multiplayer beta, not a Steam Early Access, just an old-fashioned single player demo.
It’s been a little while, hasn’t it? Not too many games churn out a single player demo that only gives you part of the full experience anymore and you might not have even noticed until just recently. Arguably, there’s a few different reasons for their disappearance and there’s one game that has the potential to change how publishers view the practice of demos: Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes.
Everyone remembers how game demos work, right? Starting with the CD era, hotly anticipated titles would be bundled in with other games, given away for free at retailers, even included with magazines. You’d be given a small sampling of a game’s early areas to get a feel for how it would play, maybe some footage, and you would just have to decide how badly you wanted to play the rest of it from there. This would continue through the downloadable era of Xbox Live and Playstation Network, with demos being made freely available over any number of platforms’ online services, but in recent years the practice has…well, not exactly disappeared, but been replaced slightly.
Thanks to the meteoric rise in popularity of online multiplayer, many games with a multiplayer component were content to release a demo (generally referred to as a ‘beta’, even if that’s not quite accurate) of the game’s online mode and that would be it until the full game released. Steam Early Access further works to confuse things by selling what is essentially a finished game that can still undergo tweaks and revisions by the developer – such as the open-world survival game Rust removing all of the zombies it initially had for foes – acting as both a closed beta test and a crowd-funding source.
It is in this world of Early Access and closed beta invites that Ground Zeroes comes into play. Ground Zeroes serves as both a standalone title, albeit a reportedly short one, and a demo of sorts for the upcoming Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Instead of giving you a section of the full retail title, Ground Zeroes presents an exclusive and full-fledged area with its own separate set of missions, side quests, and plot hooks, much like Capcom attempted with the surprisingly successful Dead Rising 2: Case Zero.
Publisher Konami’s thinking behind releasing Ground Zeroes as its own game is twofold. Developers often complain about not having enough time to assemble a demo, or fear that the demos they do release aren’t truly indicative of the final product. By setting aside a whole team and enough resources to make a smaller game based on the MGSV format, Konami was able to hand-craft what they felt was the definitive representation of how the new Metal Gear will play while not extracting a chunk of the full game, and early reports say Ground Zeroes is all the better for it.
This is where Ground Zeroes could potentially redefine how we think of demos and betas. Picture a triple-A title due out this year you’re excited about – as the process has been only applied so far to larger open-world titles, let’s pretend it’s something akin to Watch Dogs or The Witcher 3. Instead of a watered-down slice of an early area, or some fenced-off location that you can’t stray from, the developer offers you a unique area full of its own adventures – nothing huge, but enough for you to understand how the full game will work and maybe you’ll get to keep a weapon or two that you find on the way. Sure, the developers would have to charge you for it, but if the price and length were right, it’s difficult to imagine many gamers not plunking down the $10 for some manner of Grand Theft Auto prologue.
Granted, this approach won’t work for every game – not every developer has Konami’s resources. Also, there are a lot of genres (such as more linear action games) that wouldn’t easily translate to this model without losing much of what the full game represents and missing the point of this exercise. But as the success of Case Zero and Gran Turismo 5 Prologue attest to, there’s a market and desire for games that serve as an appetizer of sorts to larger games with far-off release dates, and they can only serve to make the public more excited for the full game. Any publisher with a hotly anticipated title that not much is known about – not to name names, but The Last Guardian springs to mind – would do well to watch Ground Zeroes’ sales figures and see how it works out. Who knows? We might wind up with bigger and better demos than we ever would have back in the PlayStation days.