We plan to perhaps promote our next game with an own website, but only showing black silhouettes of our characters and such. But something like that could be combined really cool with “unofficial leaked promotion” ;)

I think the “shorter demo” is also great. So you’ll just give the player 5 levels instead of 15, but the video will tell him “look at those great levels (you can’t play right now, hahaha)” :)

Making those videos some kind of hidden content, for example having to search for them in youtube (sth not difficult at all) can give the visitor the feeling of being a fan even before buying the game. This is just a random thought, but i always think making the visitor to get involved makes him/her feel more related to the product.

What about an experiment: ‘promotion by mistery’, don´t show anything official, just ‘leak’ content and create hype. No official demo, no offical video, no official screenshots…
However, this would work better with AAA :P

But I think one of the coolest things about having a video is the possibility to show it DIRECTLY. Just embed the youtube-player on your homepage and the user has to push exactly one button to see your game. That is a real kick instead of downloading, waiting, installing, clicking “next” at least 5 times, then launching, watching intro, being asked if fullscreen or windowed and such…

So a non-playable demo would just be not having to learn the controls. This is a point, of course. But in my opinion that’s the only point (aside from seeing if it runs perfectly on your computer).

I think a non interactive demo would be better than a video, you download it and get to see the actual game running, you just can’t play, you get better image quality than a video and you are seeing if the thing will run on your computer. Of course you could use this and a video for lazy people or whatever…

I think I’ve bought all non-indie PC games either by getting recommended or reading a good review about them. Hmm, actually Battlefield 1942 is probably the only game which demo I tested and then eventually purchased the full version.

And it’s correct, of course! But honestly, I think, most (casual) gamers don’t even think of that. You are a developer, so you’re aware of issues like that, but e.g. if a normal PC user goes to a retail store and buys a game, he’ll just look to the minimum requirements – if even. He surely would not go home again and first try to search for a demo to look if it REALLY runs.

So I think that’s an argument that doesn’t count too much, after all. But of course it’s good to think about it, nonetheless.