13 · Demos Are a Trap You Set for Yourself

Steam Next Fest happens. You queue up six demos to try. You spend an evening playing 30 minutes of each. You wishlist three of them. You go to bed feeling like you accomplished something.

Three months later, you’ve bought one of those games. You haven’t played it.

The demo wasn’t a sample. It was a substitute.

The dopamine of trying

Trying something new gives you a small reward. It’s the same circuit that makes wishlisting feel productive. You’re moving through novelty without commitment, and your brain treats this as pleasant.

A demo session is six new starts in one evening. Six dopamine hits, none of which require you to commit to anything. By the end, you’ve satisfied the part of you that wanted to play games tonight, without ever playing a game in any meaningful sense.

The full game would have asked more from you. It would have asked you to push through the slow first hour. It would have asked you to tolerate not understanding everything. The demo did none of that. It gave you the appetizer and packaged it as a meal.

What the demo actually tested

A 30-minute demo can tell you whether you find the controls satisfying and whether the art style appeals to you. It tells you almost nothing about whether you’ll enjoy 20 hours of the game.

The slow burn of a good game often happens after the demo would have ended. The mechanics that feel fine in the first 30 minutes can feel hollow at hour 5, or they can deepen. The demo can’t reveal which.

Demo evaluation is the most superficial form of game evaluation possible. Treating it as a basis for purchase decisions is a category error. The demo is a marketing artifact, not a fair sample.

What works

Don’t queue demos. Pick one game from a festival, play it deeper than the demo allows. If there’s no demo, watch a 20-minute review and decide.

Set a different default for trying. Instead of “I’ll try this demo for 20 minutes,” try “I’ll play this demo until it stops being interesting, even if that’s 5 minutes.” Truncate the polite politeness of completing the demo runtime. Your time is more valuable than the demo’s pacing.

Notice the substitution. If you’ve spent an evening on demos and realize you didn’t actually play a game, ask whether you wanted to play a game or wanted to feel like you did.

One more thing

Maida only knows about games you’ve actually installed. Demos count if they’re installed. So do full games. The decision is the same: launch this thirty-second decision into a thirty-minute or three-hour session, or pass.

If the demo loop has been replacing actual gaming, Maida is here. It doesn’t reward queueing.