A new marketing study found out that demos might be hurting games' sales.
The study, conducted by Gregory Short and Geoffery Zatkin, heads of the Electronic Entertainment Design and Research Group (EEDAR), and presented during MI6 video game marketing conference, found out that the highest selling games on both Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 are those who opted to release a trailer alone.
The study's findings were consistent across both consoles save for the effect of releasing a demo alone. According to the study, highest sales went to games that released only a game trailer, followed by games that released both trailers and demos.
Games that released demos sold better than games that release neither demos nor trailers on Xbox 360, but the opposite was true for Playstation 3.
The accuracy of the study's statistics is unquestionable, but they can be interpreted in a different way. We argue that those numbers are simply an indication that the best Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 games preferred releasing trailers to releasing demos.