Maes
I like big butts!
Posts: 7955
Registered: 07-06 |
Jonathan said:
[b]Giving away a full game and having it gradually degrade is just a different, and probably better, way to provide a way to try out a game than by getting people to download 3GB for a 20 minute demo.
Also this. The eras where a demo was but a tiny fraction of a game are forever gone.
E.g. Doom's shareware was approximately 1/3rd of the full game, but of a game measured in MB. In terms of distribution, this meant just two extra installation floppies, in an age where CD-ROMs had started gaining momentum, that is, slim pickens.
The Under a Killing Moon demo (a game relying heavily on FMV, BTW) could fit in a CD alongside other stuff, while the full game was 4 CDs. The Need for Speed demo (yeah, I'm talking about the original) was under 50 MB, had one full playable level and some of the extra features, and the full game was 1 whole CD.
There are countless examples, but now that games have a radically different resource architecture, large numbers of resources etc. even a demo version is going to be huge and not optimized down to the last bit. Both will require at least a single DVD to fit in or a multi-GB download which will then further expand on disk, so it makes no sense maintaining a separate code and resource branch.
A minor exception are those demos that have an online community e.g. there's still a community for the BF1942 Wake Island demo, those still have a reason to exist, but large single player "interactive experiences"? Better have one unified form with degrading.
The only thing I worry about is what new forms of DRM they will include to protect these degrading mechanisms.
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03-08-10 08:08 
