Animation Lead on Wanderstop! She/Her & Transgenderrific! Past: Radial Games, Gaslamp Games



Campster
@Campster

Man, I had really wanted to play/post about more Next Fest demos, or even do a video on a handful of them, but I got busy in the latter half of the week and the whole event just kinda came and went, huh.

I get why small devs with limited budgets can't keep demos available, generating support requests (and bad PR when the devs don't patch it) for a build from six months ago or whatever. I get it! But the limited time nature of these simultaneously grants a flurry of attention and yet closes the door way before anyone but hardcore enthusiasts can get to them. There were dozens and dozens of demos, and I tried maybe six of them.

And, yeah, some devs will opt to leave the demo up with a clear "THIS IS A JUNE 2023 DEMO BUILD" warning and such, but finding those demos is now gonna fall back on Steam's usual (dogshit) discoverability. When the festival was going they were all conveniently in one place.

Just kinda bummed about the whole thing, I guess.


MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

extremely this, as a busy person it's SO hard to find time to play all the demos I wanna play. it feels like such a waste to delete the ones I downloaded that are no longer playable afterward, not wishlisting them, but what am I supposed to do? Idk. Even one more week would make a big difference for me.


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in reply to @Campster's post:

I know this isn't a fix for the problem, but you might be able to email some of the devs, explain that you're a you're a youtube creator who covers stuff like this, and ask for a key for their demo so that you can get a video or blog post up.

That way, they can give it to you privately and not have to worry about keeping the demo up publicly.

I'm always wary about reaching out to devs about this kind of stuff, mostly because with my production schedule being what it is I can promise no one any coverage of anything. I've already got a mountain of games I want to talk about that I haven't gotten to because I spent the last two months on the COD episode, and reaching out almost implies a commitment to engage that I can't live up to. :(

I think as long as you downloaded them they still function (unless there's some multiplayer component, I guess?). I just tested an the El Paso Elsewhere and Home Safety Hotline demos both launched okay.

Really it's more that if you didn't download them most of them get delisted from the game's store page, and finding games that still have demos that were also part of Next Fest once the event is over is very difficult on Steam's current setup.

the Botany Manor demo is no longer launchable for me, the launch button now says "purchase".

(i actually support a dev's right to do that; having it be a platform/event wide policy is what i don't want to see)

It depends on which option was used by devs/publisher to disable the demo. Some like Melatonin worked for as long as you had them downloaded, but removed the redownload option.
And others just invalidated the license to run it and you couldn't play the demo even if you had the content.

A lot of devs keep their demos at least for another week (and a good amount had the demo available a week earlier too, there's usually a "press preview" link for the fest).
The ~20 demos I still have downloaded at all playable right now. Usually it's the big ones that get delisted because they can afford it, they already had the visibility boost. I generally tend to play the popular stuff last, but because of that I force myself to play them early.