Use Your Demo for Good
I saw this weekend that clever folks at Team Ninja are giving gamers an actual, honest-to-God reason to play their demo: free loot. (Thanks, Joystiq.) Players are rewarded with in-game currency based on the length of time they play the demo.
It struck me that there were a number of other interesting and unique things that a developer could do to put their demos to better use.
Link to Pre-Orders
Why, oh, why, do we still see static "Buy me when i finally come out!" images at the end of game demos? Digital retail is here! Stop asking people to remember that your game will be coming out in the future and start taking their money now.
Interested? Talk to our friends at Direct2Drive about digitally distributing your game and enabling their awesome pre-load functionality in conjunction with your pre-order program. At the very least link to some sort of retail pre-order landing page explaining where you can buy retail.
Reserve Your Nickname
Games that use our Community services have the option of letting their players choose unique nicknames on a per-game basis. Encourage people to "claim" their name by using the same namespace in your demo. (Expire old, unused nicknames at a later date or use our "Naminator" to suggest creative name variants.)
Accumulate Stats from the Demo
We see more and more games featuring leaderboards and stats. Why not combine the demo and retail info into one, unified leaderboard? Let your players jockey for position at the top in the demo and then see if they can maintain that position once the retail game comes out. We're doing this right now with the Ghost Recon 2 (PC) demo on GameSpy Arena.
There are a million other ways to make your demo a more powerful selling tool, I'm sure. When it comes time to assemble the demo resist the urge to slap together a single player level with a static "buy me" image at the end and find one of those million ideas that will work for you.
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