The best games doesnt need demos. People will be satisfyed and buy it anyway.

Gears and Halo sell themselves. Why risk turning somebody off the game? It's not like anyone who wasn't originally going to buy Gears or Halo would buy it after playing a demo, not with Microsoft's advertising.

Sorry but as he said earlier a BETA is not a DEMO. Can people still play the Halo 3 BETA? No! BETA are only available for a limited time and are solely used for helping iron out games and find bugs. Plus most BETAS you have to be chosen to get into them or in Halo 3 and Reach's case do something to earn a BETA key. DEMOs are made available for people to get a taste of a game before they make a purchase decision and don't have limited time availability.

A demo is a form of marketing and advertising. It's no different than putting out Mountain Dew flavors, TV spots, websites and viral marketing. Like others have said, some games benefit from utilizing the demo approach and some games benefit from getting splattered with huge commercials on Spike TV. Considering that a wealth of advertising and good word of mouth turned both Halo and Gears of War into marquee franchises shows that Microsoft knows more about whether the two need a demo more than any of us do.

Do note, that Sony provides a lot of it's first party titles with demos, but in the case of it's own behemoth, Gran Turismo, my American ass can't find a demo in the PSN store to save my life. Bottom line, it doesn't need one.

Just buy it.

halo CE had a demo... and thats what sold me on the whole series and the box

@SlipperyMooseCakes

Not all games have demos, and more to the point not all game development cycles allow for the making of a demos. It is really dependent on how the studio develops games. In the case of Halo 3 it would have actually been a atypical demo in that it would have to have been developed post release. After the time in which a demo can actually generate the vast majority of sales that a demo will generate.

You have to remember Bungie opted for a public beta with a short time frame prior to release. This meant they had a short time to rectify balance issues. So there probably were no assets to dedicate to developing a demo. They were probably working on code up until launch day, and actually had to continue work after launch to ensure stability, and that there were no game breaking cheats that were going to be exploited.

Then they had to get right to work on new projects, and the remaining team had to get to work on content expansions. In the end they probably didn't have the time to dedicate to something that was hardly essential. I ask you which is more important making a demo after the game has gone out, or developing content. For most owners this is an easy answer.

Then there is the danger of a demo depriving the game of sales, but not necessarily in the way you are thinking. For a representative demo you would have to include the online. Which is what most players are actually interested in. So then you have gold issues, and the real possibility that players will simply opt to use the demo rather then buying the game. Lets be real here a little bit of Halo goes a long way. Not to mention how a limited demo would fuck up the servers since those playing the demo may only get to play in a couple maps.

In the end there just isn't much of a need to make a demo, and in the end it would probably be more of a pain in the ass. That only drains money from everyone involved. The beta worked in truth, because it was limited. No need to overhaul systems to accommodate a demo, or any real need to develop one. The beta gave players the answer they wanted most of all.

Combat Evolved was a lot more single-player focused than the other games in the series: you really can't do justice to Halo 3 (the best part of which is the online) with a short snippet of the good but not brilliant campaign.

i reckon if they did do demos for those games (proper demo's not betas) it would be like the original half-life demo, the one that had nothing to do with the original game, just so it didn't give anything away of the storyline, which was amazing about the orignial half-life demo.