Idea of limited time demo is horrible and unfair

[qmish]

I started notice this awful trend just several years ago, when Steam accepted such behaviour during "NEXT" festival events.

As player, I find this concept being hilariously awful and anti-consumer. And also unfair. Why unfair? Because only those people, who knew about the game and the demo version, have chance to play the demo version (or at least download and keep - unless developer goes even further and enables deactivation mechanism - which IS possible, e.g. such plans are now for Eternal Cylinder demo). So imagine, someone learns about the game AFTER, and yet such person can not taste the demo because it was only available some time before. Before that person even knew about the game itself.

In my eyes, that's an unforgiveable, and also nonsensical.

Removing/deactivating demos after current Steam Festival Even ends, or after the game reaches release is just disrespect for audience, and also shooting their own legs for developers. Considering how random our life is, so many people will never have ability to learn about the game and check demo "during 1-2 weeks", no, instead so many people find out about this or that game later. Often after release, by a word of mouth, etc. etc.

So what's the freaking point to remove demo that was already made? Do you not want more people buy your game? Do you think that you only need those very few people who were caught into your FOMO marketing approach and don't care about anyone else? This is just a huge letdown, and I didn't expect such knife into back from dear and respectable "indie" part of game industry, who gained the status of "we are better than soulless corporations" during last decade or something. Please, do not damage your hard earned reputation, for the sake of game culture sanity and health!

Also have to note that very often demo versions have SteamDRM (or even Denuvo? lol) attached to them, so you can't just back-up it like it was in good old days with CD magazines.
And this whole approach is the same gamble and disrespect as the "unique bonuses" for pre-order, which then are completely impossible to get otherwise.

P.S.
At the same time, I note that it is very annoying that Steam does not allow you to upload screenshots of “destroyed” demo versions to your profile. So I have a “dead weight” of many beautiful shots for demos that are no longer available.

[BryanM]

This is pretty damn bizarre. The MMO scene used to have the two week demo as standard, until competition built up and the prestige of their newness wore off, that now you can basically play any base game MMO for absolutely free. Hell, I think most of them throw a couple expansion packs on top of that.

I guess they're too fk'ing lazy to build a demo version these days, eh.

The storefront thing of giving away free full-price games promotionally has led to some lol's. Not getting Grand Theft Auto 5 for free, but so many people were mad at Left Four Dead 2. Signed boycott pledges promising to boycott the game, then buying it day 1, while little 'ole me quietly got it for free later, played it for a couple days, lol'ed, and carried on. Good times.

Also don't give money to Valve. They're an evil video game landlord, they've stolen more enough money from actual workers as it is.