Zoidberg: Taking into account that a lot of devs don't care about key rebindings, rendering games unplayable, this is reason enough for me to ignore this game altogether, and that's a pity.
Spectrum_Legacy: Is the situation really that dire to warrant avoiding the game? I mean we are on PC, an open platform... redefining keys on a generic hid kb takes less time than writing this post whether it's supported by the game or not.
Should this feature be included in-game options though? Absolutely! Unity3d even has built in launcher for doing exactly that and it might be just a simple config file edit in worse case.
So in the end, whose pity it really is...whose indeed.
Carradice: Got any source for that?
Spectrum_Legacy: Probably some case where their game wasn't good in the first place and demo gave it away... esp. big corp/publishers don't like to do demos from my experience, since they rely on hype/pr/marketing. On the other hand it takes resources to develop/maintain a demo branch, since in some engines it's quit a lot of extra work to create the demoloop (removing content, code, etc causes issues), while in other engines it's rather easy (e.g. gamemaker, where you can simply put "end of the demo room" at a certain event/stage, but I would still remove the extra content).
For me playing a demo is more like confirmation of what I saw in the gameplay trailer and on screenshots. Either I'm interested or not...at least for me it's that simple. I just get to see how it looks/sounds/runs on my setup. If I wasn't interested to begin with, I wouldn't bother with the demo 99% of time anyway.
Man, you nailed it. Check this, straight from the first link provided above:
>>the best-selling games were those that built expectations in players, but then gave them no way to try it out short of buying a copy.
So, yes, hype.
Then, different market segments might be expected to behave differently. Take Total War: Warhammer. People know Total War already. People know Warhammer. Well done or badly done, you have fair clues about the kind of game you might expect.
Take a more obscure game that cannot allow for a vast marketing effort. Moreover, a game that tries to distinguish itself from others. Maybe doing a few things differently, maybe better, maybe doing something no one did before. A demo can help people find out.
Hype, purchase, disappointment, uninstall, mark the maker down in order to avoid it like the plague. Is that the marketing model that this guy promotes? Is it healthy for the industry at all?
Just from the top of my mind, there are so many games that I wouldn't have bought these games EVER if not for their demos.