Friday, May 29, 2015

Silently Gone

The good ole days of demo discs

Crazy things that only happen in this digital age - digital copy of demos selling at a high price.

Yes the PT debacle. 

Now I'm not going to talk about my disdain for the project but I figure the news of PS4 containing a digital copy of the demo warrants a mention. After this game was announced to be cancelled, sellers started putting their ps4 with the demo up for sale on eBay for absurd prices. 

The thing about digital files is that it multiplies each time it's copied or in this case, downloaded. That's part of the appeal for publishers to go digital, they don't have to deal with the hassle of estimating how much to print. The more they print the more cost they incur. Instead just put the digital file online and the demand will determine the distribution flow with no additional cost.

So the PT demo was available was quite a while as I remembered a certain penny-pincher talking about it more than six months ago. Its distribution easily exceeded several millions if we just estimated a percentage of the 20 million plus ps4 users downloaded it.Now it's no longer available and unless someone reserve-engineer the ps4 hardware to copy the demo, you are not likely to get it anymore. But at the end of the day, it's still just a digital file made up of nothing tangible and distributed over a million times before. Who in the right mind would pay so much for a demo of a cancelled game?

A few years ago, EA sports also cancelled their NBA Elite (a re-branding of sorts of their long running NBA Live series) game shortly before release. A demo of that game was available on PSN before the game was cancelled. The removed demo never amount to anything of value but I read that retail copies of the finished game surfaced briefly before being pulled from the stores. Now those retail copies are serious collector items which I can understand but not this digital age nonsense.


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