Demos for your Games

I know there's a User a little ways down this list of posts that details why Demos are BAD(which I somewhat agree with), but I'm here to say what can be GOOD about a Demo for your Game.

I think that if the Demo is a Prologue to the story of the Main Game, it could prove to be a useful bit that not only gives you a bite sized game to get people interested or hyped up for your game, but also can prove helpful toward understanding, or knowing a little more, about the story.

What are your thoughts? What's the best example of a Game Demo you can think of? Either a Game made by an RPG Maker User, or big name titles.

In my opinion, a Demo should be like a piece of the games prologue, I myself cringe up a lot when people offer their demo and when you start it you end up in some random place and you have no idea what to do, there are no introduction, no story no nothing, you just start in some random place and they expect you to figure out what to do.

When making a demo, you need to put story into it and you need to know what you are suppose to do in the demo and by the end of the prologue/demo just slowly dim the screen black and leave a message saying something or just "Thanks for playing" by default. So please people, when you are making a demo and you make it available, don't let it be some random start up with no introduction story or idea of the game. Not only it wastes the players/testers time but it also gives a bad picture of your game. Demo's are meant to 'WOW' the players and keep them interested for the real thing to come out, not tease them annoyingly.

I agree that a good Demo needs to basically be "Here's a good reason to play this game."  If the game has really unique features, the demo needs to showcase them.  If it's a crafting system, maybe start the demo player with some craftable items and skills.  If it's a profoundly new magic system, start with a brief tutorial on the magic system and give the player the skills/items/etc to toy with the magic system a bit.

If the draw is the in-depth characters, the demo needs to showcase at least one or two key character cutscenes. 

If the draw is the interesting story, the demo absolutely needs to give an intro and enough story matter to interest the player, and ideally make the player have some level of emotional investment in what happens to the characters.

And a game demo needs to give some context, no matter what else it's showcasing.  Unless it's a developer-only "What do you think of this feature implementation?" demo, it needs to draw players into the game's world.

Otherwise, it won't really build interest for your game, defeating the very purpose of having a demo in the first place.