Last streams were amazing, playing all the demos and checking out lots of upcoming games, I’m a bit sad I was away during weekend, but I would have some other plans with RPG Sunday and Our Games Show anyway, so probably wouldn’t play many demos anyway.
Bunch of demos are still available and we played them even after festival was technically over and now there will be a bunch that I will play later when I’m back on my Demo Friday for sure. I was a bit skeptical about the concept of this festival, but now I changed my mind…
I don’t really like the concept of timed demos, bunch of games have demos, but they are available only during some particular time, while some events are going etc. I still don’t really like it, but now I like the idea of Steam Festival, when we got a huge drop of demos in one day, it kinda resonates with my E3 opinion – it’s just a celebration of gaming, when there is a lot of relevant stuff happening in the same time and it indeed feels very festive, you get access to whole bunch of demos, you need to try as much as you can, you hear from people what they tried and recommended. That was a great experience, but now it is also nice that many games didn’t remove their demos, they didn’t make them exclusive for the Festival and that makes it even better, after festive part was over we don’t feel sad, because some of the attractions are still staying and we can always do some more demos. That is I think a great way to handle it, even though it creates a bit of a flawed “mechanic” when I was deciding on priority of demos to play based on their time limit or lack of it, like obviously you want to play stuff you know you won’t be able to play in a couple of days, things that stay after you can play after, right? So that’s a bit of a downside, but overall was really nice and I hope it will be regular thing now.
From the dev perspective I’m sure it was nice too, because it gave so many different companies, including indie developers an opportunity to show their games and in this “dry” year with not a lot of ways to network, to pitch your games to publishers, event like this is a blessing.
In general I really like the return of demos, big return, a lot of demos and prologues available nowadays for us to try and decide if we are interested or not, if it runs well on our PCs or not. It’s always exciting and fun to try some new demo and I would say pretty frequently it actually makes me more interested in different games, adds more hype for some upcoming releases, like now I’m really looking forward to play Grounded, even though I wanted to do it before the demo, but demo increased this desire a lot.