Extend the demo time please

[Miranda]

I had just started to try out the game yesterday and wanted to share it with some friends ahah.
Amazing demo though!

[Jakethebeest]

Assuming the Demo is still installed on your computer, you can still play it by launching the executable directly.


if you don't know where it is: Right click on the game, go to properties, under "installed files" then browse local files, then launch the executable directly.

Though i wouldn't recommend sharing around the file as i don't know how steam handles DRM.

[Frostbite]

Having a timed demo was such a bad move.

The whole point of a demo is to give players an inviting introduction to a game they potentially want to buy. I heard about this game today and wanted to check it out, as all of my friends had been talking about it, only to find that its now gone.

For what viable reason was there to take down the demo from Steam? People are going to upload the files of this game online anyways. If anything, having an extended demo could allow for MORE people to submit reports of issues with the game, giving the developers more useful information. If the demo gets uploaded again when the game is released, then it was pointless removing it in the first place.

The game looks SO good. It truly is a quality product and I would have loved to play it if the demo was still accessible. This put such a bad taste in my mouth that I can't even consider purchasing this game anymore, despite loving CotND and Cadence of Hyrule.

[enzmagus2025]

Originally posted by John Marston:

Having a timed demo was such a bad move.

The whole point of a demo is to give players an inviting introduction to a game they potentially want to buy. I heard about this game today and wanted to check it out, as all of my friends had been talking about it, only to find that its now gone.

For what viable reason was there to take down the demo from Steam? People are going to upload the files of this game online anyways. If anything, having an extended demo could allow for MORE people to submit reports of issues with the game, giving the developers more useful information. If the demo gets uploaded again when the game is released, then it was pointless removing it in the first place.

The game looks SO good. It truly is a quality product and I would have loved to play it if the demo was still accessible. This put such a bad taste in my mouth that I can't even consider purchasing this game anymore, despite loving CotND and Cadence of Hyrule.

seems a bit of an overreaction no? i agree there's not much point in having it be a timed demo, but it's probably coming out some time soon, and it's ultimately not that big a deal?

[Rei]

Didn't even find out it had a demo until I just got a Youtube video recommended of someone beating all Demo Songs.
Only a week to try the Demo sucks and is a kick in the shin towards everyone who didn't stumble upon it.

I'm very curious about the game, and in the unlikely case they bring the demo back (because why remove it then in the first place?), I would have to buy the game, play it for up to 2 hours to then decide if I want to refund or keep it?

Just keep the demo running, it's the most customer-oriented move, they already paid the listing fee, so there is literally no cost in keeping it running for longer at least, doesn't have to be forever. Yet downloading it through SteamDB is not possible, as they went the extra step to remove the license for the demo to make sure no one can try it.

Great move!

[SheepFreak]

+1 missed it ._.

[LibraryPimp]

i missed it as well and its really annoying but while talking in another thread here i think i can understand why the devs made it timed, i will just quote my post about it

Originally posted by LibraryPimp:

thinking back the critical "error" might be pretty bigger then you think and its a given for every game of the genere and i can kinda understand the devs fear here.

user made songs

almost every rhythm game today gets patched by dedicated fans to add custom songs, while games like project diva have some tougher neccesities to do so, games like beat saber for example were generally easy enough for even the devs to later recognize and add it as a feature.
and in terms of needed effort (after making a proper way to patch fan songs), rift only need song/bpm/beat map so its on the easier side, which usually makes the custom song collection thrive.

what im assuming is that the devs are afraid some dedicated fan/s will take the long time they got to wait for the full game and start to mod the demo, resulting in a situation where maybe many users will just stick with the demo and custom songs so they wont have a reason to play the full game.
some rhythm games havent did such things, but the only ones i can find where by big companies with dedicated game "protection" (horrible stuffs like denvo) so they arent worried like a smaller dev team that is pretty much only for making games and not such protection of their games.


so while its annoying i kinda can understand why they are so worried to remove the demo

[Jakethebeest]

Originally posted by LibraryPimp:

i missed it as well and its really annoying but while talking in another thread here i think i can understand why the devs made it timed, i will just quote my post about it

Originally posted by LibraryPimp:

thinking back the critical "error" might be pretty bigger then you think and its a given for every game of the genere and i can kinda understand the devs fear here.

user made songs
...

This logic fails in a couple of ways. first off, as discussed before. a demo being timed does not uninstall any files or prevent the user from accessing them. a dedicated fan still has full access to the game and can still mod it. all a timed demo does is prevent new people from being able to download the game.

secondly as far as i could tell, this game would be fairly difficult to mod without official support. adding custom songs would require the game to be able to play them so you need to mod this functionality in. but the issue is, is that this game uses unity which means the version of the game on your computer is pre compiled. which means no access to the games source code. and the game doesn't have the ability to run other scripts, so it'll be a mess to mod. someone dedicated enough would be able to mod it. but it will probably take a few years and honestly wouldn't be worth it until the full game comes out.

[Cheggf]

Originally posted by Jakethebeest:

Originally posted by LibraryPimp:

i missed it as well and its really annoying but while talking in another thread here i think i can understand why the devs made it timed, i will just quote my post about it

This logic fails in a couple of ways. first off, as discussed before. a demo being timed does not uninstall any files or prevent the user from accessing them. a dedicated fan still has full access to the game and can still mod it. all a timed demo does is prevent new people from being able to download the game.

secondly as far as i could tell, this game would be fairly difficult to mod without official support. adding custom songs would require the game to be able to play them so you need to mod this functionality in. but the issue is, is that this game uses unity which means the version of the game on your computer is pre compiled. which means no access to the games source code. and the game doesn't have the ability to run other scripts, so it'll be a mess to mod. someone dedicated enough would be able to mod it. but it will probably take a few years and honestly wouldn't be worth it until the full game comes out.

The full game which has official mod support baked in, so no one would even bother trying to mod the demo to begin with.

[LibraryPimp]

Originally posted by Jakethebeest:

Originally posted by LibraryPimp:

i missed it as well and its really annoying but while talking in another thread here i think i can understand why the devs made it timed, i will just quote my post about it

This logic fails in a couple of ways. first off, as discussed before. a demo being timed does not uninstall any files or prevent the user from accessing them. a dedicated fan still has full access to the game and can still mod it. all a timed demo does is prevent new people from being able to download the game.

secondly as far as i could tell, this game would be fairly difficult to mod without official support. adding custom songs would require the game to be able to play them so you need to mod this functionality in. but the issue is, is that this game uses unity which means the version of the game on your computer is pre compiled. which means no access to the games source code. and the game doesn't have the ability to run other scripts, so it'll be a mess to mod. someone dedicated enough would be able to mod it. but it will probably take a few years and honestly wouldn't be worth it until the full game comes out.

Ok it seems like you understand more then me in code so i will take it as facts.
So i take it back, i cant find a real reason for a timed demo

[Ｈｅｎｋｅ３７]

Originally posted by Jakethebeest:

but the issue is, is that this game uses unity which means the version of the game on your computer is pre compiled. which means no access to the games source code. and the game doesn't have the ability to run other scripts, so it'll be a mess to mod.

It's trivially decompileable to C# code. It's not even ill2cpp compiled.

[Jakethebeest]

Originally posted by Ｈｅｎｋｅ３７:

It's trivially decompileable to C# code. It's not even ill2cpp compiled.

because you failed to add any information on how to do this. i had to look into it myself. and i guess it is possible, though trivial is a understatement, though fairly easy if you've done it before. i'd still imagine that it would still take a fair bit of effort to mod the game in this way though so the rest of my statement still stands.

[Cheggf]

Originally posted by Jakethebeest:

Originally posted by Ｈｅｎｋｅ３７:

It's trivially decompileable to C# code. It's not even ill2cpp compiled.

because you failed to add any information on how to do this. i had to look into it myself. and i guess it is possible, though trivial is a understatement, though fairly easy if you've done it before. i'd still imagine that it would still take a fair bit of effort to mod the game in this way though so the rest of my statement still stands.

And also the thing that actually would be trivially easy is downloading someone's reupload of the demo, if the modders don't already do that (it'd be a lot easier to just release their own modded executable over releasing a patcher to modify existing executables).

[LibraryPimp]

Originally posted by Cheggf:

Originally posted by Jakethebeest:

because you failed to add any information on how to do this. i had to look into it myself. and i guess it is possible, though trivial is a understatement, though fairly easy if you've done it before. i'd still imagine that it would still take a fair bit of effort to mod the game in this way though so the rest of my statement still stands.

And also the thing that actually would be trivially easy is downloading someone's reupload of the demo, if the modders don't already do that (it'd be a lot easier to just release their own modded executable over releasing a patcher to modify existing executables).

theres a big difference here, an exe file of a game/demo is legally different then a mod of game.
you can mod every game (under "fair use") by only giving away the mod and the devs cant do anything to you, but the demo itself is not to be shared in the same way and the devs can go after the one who reuploaded it if they wanted to.
yes there are many different ways to deter players from modding, but removing the demo is still a way to make sure the game wont suddenlly get shared with the new mods someone patched.

[Cheggf]

Originally posted by LibraryPimp:

Originally posted by Cheggf:

And also the thing that actually would be trivially easy is downloading someone's reupload of the demo, if the modders don't already do that (it'd be a lot easier to just release their own modded executable over releasing a patcher to modify existing executables).

theres a big difference here, an exe file of a game/demo is legally different then a mod of game.
you can mod every game (under "fair use") by only giving away the mod and the devs cant do anything to you, but the demo itself is not to be shared in the same way and the devs can go after the one who reuploaded it if they wanted to.
yes there are many different ways to deter players from modding, but removing the demo is still a way to make sure the game wont suddenlly get shared with the new mods someone patched.

You can't mod every game and that isn't even remotely close to what fair use is. Blizzard wins 8.5 million dollar lawsuit against people modding their game.[www.eurogamer.net] The law is a lot more complicated than just saying words you heard a YouTuber say. If BYG or Klei wanted to go after people for uploading their demo, they could. If they wanted to go after people for uploading a modified version of their demo, they could. If they wanted to go after people for uploading a patcher to modify their demo, they could, and the people who are releasing that patcher are going to just acquiesce and take it down instead of trying to spend more money than they have on lawyers to try to win a legal battle that they have nothing to gain from winning. I don't think BYG or Klei would do any of those things, but they could if they wanted to.

[LibraryPimp]

Originally posted by Cheggf:

Originally posted by LibraryPimp:

theres a big difference here, an exe file of a game/demo is legally different then a mod of game.
you can mod every game (under "fair use") by only giving away the mod and the devs cant do anything to you, but the demo itself is not to be shared in the same way and the devs can go after the one who reuploaded it if they wanted to.
yes there are many different ways to deter players from modding, but removing the demo is still a way to make sure the game wont suddenlly get shared with the new mods someone patched.

You can't mod every game and that isn't even remotely close to what fair use is. Blizzard wins 8.5 million dollar lawsuit against people modding their game.[www.eurogamer.net] The law is a lot more complicated than just saying words you heard a YouTuber say. If BYG or Klei wanted to go after people for uploading their demo, they could. If they wanted to go after people for uploading a modified version of their demo, they could. If they wanted to go after people for uploading a patcher to modify their demo, they could, and the people who are releasing that patcher are going to just acquiesce and take it down instead of trying to spend more money than they have on lawyers to try to win a legal battle that they have nothing to gain from winning. I don't think BYG or Klei would do any of those things, but they could if they wanted to.

My point is actually based on the more well known "game genie vs Nintendo" case and "duke nukem vs user generated levels".
Game genie won against Nintendo (uk court) while duke nukem won (usa) BUT it was because of the use of the game assets for the mod.
Your case is about how a cheat engine ruined the experience of the "normal" players and by that blizzard won.
This case leaned heavily on harming other users and not the company itself.
Im not going to pretend im a lawyer or something, but at the same time i believe we both are in the same area of knowledge about how complicated the law really is.
Overall based on those 3 examples, as long as the mods aren't made with stolen assets (not really a problem in rhythm games since most use a "beatmap" and not a generated level from scratch) i dont see the problem.
The only reason i can see is if they will harm the game sales (which is also a problem, but since i have no idea if a demo and the full game are different legally then two games im lost).
The closet case i know about is Nintendo against project m/slippi which both werent court cases but a cease and desist letters with no grounds since they believe emulation is illegal.
Also Nintendo vs switch emulation (against yuzo emulator).
And the best counter example is sony vs bleem! (an emulator as well), sony lost both the court case and the appeal in two different lawsuits.


So overall based on older lawsuits its completely possible, but based on recent cease and desist (or specificly Nintendo outside of courts) its impossible.
"Fair use" is just a word i used since i dont understand the complicated law, but if were going by examples my point still stands