We speak to Game Sessions CEO Ed French about the fall and rise of the free demo

The grand tradition of the free demo has largely died out over the past few years. As games get ever more expensive and technically advanced, our ability to try before we buy is almost non-existent. There’s no shortage of times when I’ve taken a punt on an interesting new release only to find out that it runs like total dog on my machine, and I’m sure you’ve been there too. New service Game Sessions aims to help gamers avoid that very situation. By signing up for a free account you can get access to trial versions of an increasing library of games, download them to Steam, and play them for a few hours before deciding whether they’re right for you or not. I spoke to Game Sessions CEO Ed French to find out more.

GameWatcher: We’ve seen a few supplementary programmes for PC users lately, with things like OnLive and Gaikai. What separates Game Sessions from those other services?

Ed French: The key thing with Game Sessions is that we’re not trying to emulate what a game is going to be like when you own it, we’re actually letting you download the full thing on to your PC. The experience you get is exactly the game, for good or ill of course, as it would be if you purchased the game. If you’ve got a fantastic gaming rig with the latest tech and 4K resolution support, then that’s what you’ll get. If, on the other hand, your machine is not quite that powerful, you’ll be able to see if the game works for you.

The other thing is that if you decide to buy the game, because you’ve already got it on your machine you can buy it very quickly and easily. It’s not like you’ve got a demo, you’ve then got to go and download the full game. If you like what you play it’s there and ready to go.

GameWatcher: Essentially the service you’re offering is a return to the good old days of the demo, when you could try out something to see if it worked, or if indeed you actually liked it, before you spent your money on it.

Ed French: That is the most important thing, in my opinion. We speak to gamers and that’s the feedback we get from everybody. So many games now are sold on hype and anticipation ahead of launch, rather than the game actually being something that you’re compelled to go on and purchase having tried it out a bit. What we’re trying to do is make that process instant. You pay in-game, you don’t even have to leave the game to buy it if you decide you like what you’re playing. You can rent as well. Not every publisher is up for that, but most are, and if you decide to rent you buy a slice of time – I’m sure there are gamers who are sufficiently wealthy to be able to buy every single game that comes out whether it turns out to be good or bad, but not too many I would imagine.

GameWatcher: How are you finding working with various different publishers? Your service kind of relies upon getting them on board. Are they typically interested in the concept?

Ed French: It’s not too bad, actually. It’s not particularly fast – publishers tend to be very careful and slow about signing on for things, and we’re a relatively young company - but I don’t think a single publisher has told us that we’re not welcome at their door, they just operate at varying speeds. Every publisher we’ve spoken to sees the value of our service. I think there’s been a huge change in values over the last few years, the idea that you’ve got to make content that people like, and as long as you’re doing that, as long as you have confidence in your content there’s absolutely no down-side to letting people try it before they purchase it.

You might not believe this, but publishers actually really like demos too. There was a slightly trendy period a few years back after a report came out claiming that releasing a demo destroyed the value of your game, but if your game’s good they really don’t. When you talk to publishers they often say that they really wanted to do a demo, but it’s actually really hard to do. Especially when you’re talking about today’s big open world games, figuring out what content to include in a demo and what to section off, then making sure it’s in a fit state and won’t crash, is incredibly tricky. So often publishers actually want to release one, but when they’re so close to launch and they have to do all this extra work to create a workable demo, they decide at the last minute that they have to step back from creating one. That’s why we find a lot of them are very keen on what we do, because we give players the opportunity to get their hands on the full experience. And obviously it’s far easier for a customer to go from a trial to a purchase, rather than having to download a separate demo, install it, then uninstall and download the full game.

GameWatcher: Does the fact that you’re offering Steam keys help convince them? Because obviously there’s DRM protection built in there.

Ed French: What I’d suggest to you, and actually most publishers get this, a lot of gamers would be surprised how open and enlightened publishers are about piracy and the whole DRM thing. They recognise the fact that DRM doesn’t really deliver what they want, and that’s why they’ve backed off from it in the last few years. The best answer to piracy is to do the best you can to encourage people to buy a legitimate version by making the best games you can. We’ve been asking gamers about piracy, and the biggest reason people say they do it is because they don’t know whether they will like a game or not. Of course, when you’ve pirated something there’s not much motivation to go on and buy it legitimately. Giving people the chance to try something first means you have the opportunity to convert them into legitimate customers. A good transaction for everyone is when someone plays a trial, enjoys a game, and then buys it because it’s good.

GameWatcher: Do your trials differ in length depending on what the publisher wants?

Ed French: They do. At the moment they’re time-based. That will change, there’s an option that will be available shortly for developers to specify a particular end point rather than being purely on time, because obviously some people do go at different speeds. Currently the publisher decides a unit of time that they’re happy with, typically an hour. That’s proved to be the most popular. We are actually talking to one major publisher at the moment that’s happy to give people a whole week. They’re that convinced by the service that they’re happy to let players have a week of game time.

GameWatcher: Obviously if you’re downloading a full-size game to try it out for an hour, you need a fast and efficient download method. Can your service provide that?

Ed French: Yes. We don’t do anything about the size of your hard drive obviously, that’s not something we can change. What we do have is some patented technology that provides a completely new approach to compression. It only works with games, but it does allow us to make games typically around a third of their size. To be honest that’s why the company started in the first place. One of the biggest barriers to trials as a mechanism for selling games is that the numbers don’t add up; if your download takes too long people don’t complete it, and you also have to pay for an awful lot of bytes being shipped to an awful lot of people who might not end up buying it. So it’s hard to do unless you’ve got something like the compression technology we have – it’s one of our key magic pieces that makes our service possible, and it makes games much faster to download.

GameWatcher: The trial games you offer work exclusively through Steam. How closely have you been working with Valve, and are they supportive of Game Sessions?

Ed French: Valve have been nothing but friendly to us. Without them around the PC gaming scene over the last few years would have been much worse off, so we’re very happy to be working with them. For their part, I think around twenty per cent of the people who go and get a game from us don’t actually have Steam on their machine. We’re fairly conscious of the fact that back in the day PC gaming could be a fairly horrible experience, and required quite a lot of tweaking and so on. Publishers have been doing a great job of improving that over the last few years, and the increased performance of modern hardware means that it’s not such a painful experience any more. The fear factor of getting into PC gaming can be mitigated somewhat. Especially with a service like ours that means you can try something out to see if it’s right for you without forking out your hard earned cash on something you can’t play.

GameWatcher: Are you planning to work with other online retailers in the future?

Ed French: We’re entirely agnostic about that, we’d love to work with all of the other online retailers. There’s been a bit of a reduction in those over the last few years, actually, there’s not quite as many as there once was. Many sites have just fallen back on re-selling Steam codes, but GOG.com is still there which is great, we’d love to do something with them. We’ve also been talking to the other two big platforms as well. Nothing to announce yet, but certainly everyone in the industry right now that we’ve spoken to feels positive about the fact that allowing customers to try their products out is a good thing.

GameWatcher: You entered a second beta stage at the end of last year, and added several titles including Ryse: Son of Rome to your library. Do you have more to come in early 2015?

Ed French: You’ll see a lot of new titles on our service, yes. I’ve actually got a big chart with a list of titles going through the preparation process right now. We’ve got more than fifty games on the service so far, and that’s increasing rapidly. By next week I expect us to have about eight or nine more. We’ve got a big queue of games we’re preparing to add. So that’s lovely, and we’re also increasing the number of publishers we’re working with too. So there’s going to be a tonne of new games to try soon.

Sniper Elite 3’s now available, that’s overtaken Ryse as the most popular download. We’re quite passionate about adding games like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, which we also have available now – because that game is so different a trial really does it justice. There are a few games that we don’t feel are right for trials. We’re not rushing out to get Goat Simulator, because that’s kind of one joke, and if you get the joke that’s sort of it. Personally I wouldn’t put Papers Please on it, because while that game’s an amazing achievement, after I’d played it once I was so depressed I didn’t want to play it again. It’s not good for games that you won’t want to play a lot, it’s much better for games that you’ll want to come back to. There’s lots of great indie titles that fit that template.

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Many thanks to Ed for talking to me. If you want to find out more about Game Sessions, you should head on over to the official website, where you’ll be able to find out more about the service and sign up for an account.