If so then hopefully you have more people that come around to liking your game than the ones that don't like it and are disgusted at having paid for it.

you don't want people to "come around to liking your game". that's a marginally qualified sales lead at best. of course if you've already taken their money, it doesn't matter then, unless you get the "no mans sky" type backlash.

The one that I heard was that you should sell services, not products.

that's for regular IT.

what you want is to be like Kubrick, or John Ford, or Cecil B Demille, or any big draw actor like Carry Grant or John Wayne. folks seek out your product due to your reputation.

half-life, warcarft. these products have a reputation for delivering a high quality gaming experience of a specific type. so folks are interested when bungee or blizzard makes a new game.

"sell services" is the valve and steam route. them that can - make games, them that can't - sell them. lot more money and a lot less risk than making games.

you have to remember that games are an art form, like film, books, music, etc. merchandising is the "sell services" way to make money on artworks. just look at Star Wars.

The preferred modern day way to do this, over providing demos, appears to be to use videos of gameplay.

it does have certain advantages. possibly less work, you can showcase just what you want, nothing to hack.

but from a user perspective its still not quite the same as a real playable demo. think about it, we'd all probably rather have a demo than a video, or better yet, both a video, and a demo.

having a demo would probably help push fence sitters over to your side.

You missed my point. It's a procedurally generated game. Most of the assets are in the code.

turn off the code. same idea as not including the 3d model file.

The big companies have done the numbers on this and they're very sure about how it works.

how it works - for them.

its really a difference of outlook on how one should conduct business. building long term relations, vs smash and grab. for big companies like EA, the're just in it for the money, not the art, they'd be just as happy making oven mits or taco sauce if it was as profitable. so they don't worry too much when folks say "EA = evilsauce!" as long as their earnings per share are ok. there are always other users, games, and dev studios to take advantage of. they just have to make sure they don't p*ss off the whole world at the same time.

I already said that it can be different for smaller companies who need a way to get promotion, but that's a separate issue.

quite true. playable demos are an excellent "Guerrilla Marketing" tool. ; )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_marketing

i actually first heard that term used in some quote by Philippe Kahn of Borland

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Kahn

i stared with MS basic, then Borland pascal, then Borland C++, then Watcom C++, then MS C++. always was a big fan of Borland.

You missed my point. It's a procedurally generated game. Most of the assets are in the code.

turn off the code. same idea as not including the 3d model file.

That's not how procedural generation works.

You could still turn off code for whole subsystems and still have a playable game demo though.

right now the demo for Caveman includes all mesh, model, and texture assets for all ~50 monster types in the game (i have yet to strip them out), but only initializes the stats for perhaps 3 types of monsters, and uses separate encounter tables that only include those monsters. so the assets are still in there for the moment, but the code to initialize and encounter the monster types is turned off.

the game also has two different routines for generating a game world map, one that generates a random 2500x2500 mile world, and a second one that generates a hard coded 100x100 mile island in a 2500x2500 mile ocean for the demo version. the demo version does not include the code to generate a full world. link time code generation rocks! turn off the high level code with a #ifdef, and all the low level stuff only used by that code automatically gets stripped out at link time. leaving nothing to hack, and no unused code to download.