Resident Evil: Village (Demo) -- #1. Recursive Advertisement!

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In a slight deviation from the new ground I'd been covering lately, I'm going to play a demo. A different demo! A very... controversial demo. Mostly because... it's not good.

I mean, the demo itself isn't technically problematic, but it's wrapped up in so many layers of irritating nonsense that I don't even know where to begin... but let's try anyway!

Capcom has had a long and tumultuous relationship with demos, mind you... demos are hard! Demos are... difficult to approach with thoughtful nuance and evenhanded consideration when there are many competing considerations to be taken into account when deciding to deploy one, and business logic often trumps conventional wisdom or basic psychology..

The end result: this demo is... not very thoughtfully managed. It happens more often than not, really, because demos are complex and complicated beasts. It's a living advertisement that you build to draw in and entice prospective customers... but you need to weigh the costs against the benefits. Give players too much content, and you risk having nothing else to entice them with. Give too little, and you'll have an audience that's confused what the big deal was and why they should've even wasted their time playing even that much.

Considering the big business that is the video game industry, it's easy to see why many err on the side of caution in avoiding the former, even if it means possibly ramming straight into the latter pitfall.

However, in my humble armchair analyst opinion, this is a terribly flawed form of reasoning... and the slippery slope it can lead your demo down before it even hits your prospective consumers' download queues is by far the more damaging threat to a demo's overall objective. If you damage the relationship with who you hope will be your paying customers before they even have the chance to spend any money on your product, you'll be burning that bridge instead of building it.

Case in point, Capcom has long fluctuated and run the gamut of precisely how permissive or restrictive their demos end up being.

The easiest and thereby "dumbest" demo archetype is the one that's more or less the full game or a small segment of it... and the real limiting factor is in-built to the means by which it's presented. Nintendo eShop demos originally came with a certain fixed number of times you could start up the software. Xbox and PlayStation digital demos tended to opt for a hard-coded time limit that was always ticking down until the software would no longer become usable.

Even if you realistically have no expectation of using the full allocation of uses or time spent before the demo manages to properly impress upon you what the game's supposed to be like and whether or not it resonates with your audience is somewhat secondary and beyond the first impression you're making: you fear the demo's capacity to undermine its own purpose by competing with the software it's intended to promote. Anyone who fails to see the obvious contradiction in terms here is putting the cart before the horse and cutting off their nose to spite their face, among other colorful metaphors.

Obviously, for some people, a demo is indeed enough to satisfy their curiosity... or indeed the only thing they can presently afford to simulate the full experience, notably the case with children who don't have control of their own financial decisions... but that's less a case of a demo competing with a full game than it not being possible to sell the game to people in those situations.

It gets better, though! THIS demo was only playable on one ecosystem on one particular date for a very particular matter of a few hours AND only for a finite duration of actual gameplay within that period. More precisely, HALF of the demo was available one weekend and the other half was available the following. If you couldn't make it? Too bad!

Now, it's available everywhere the game will be sold for at least the week leading up to launch... but you STILL only get an hour of cumulative playtime, tops. Enforced!

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Beyond all that, this demo is actually pretty annoying on top of being woefully misguided as to its role in the grander scheme of things... it includes a trailer, which isn't problematic in and of itself, so much as... unable to read the temperature of the room... and they're the ones selling it!

So you play this advertisement and can watch an advertisement within it... in fact, it's the only element of the demo that will remain active after it has run its intended course. It'll also play after every time you interact with any of its other, more time-sensitive modes, no matter the outcome. Surprise! Have an ad in your ad!

This video was more or less a test to see if Capcom would also want to monetize my video if I included it, essentially ALSO making it a multi-pronged advertisement on their behalf.

...it was a totally valid experiment!