XBOX 360 Wire

PGR4 Demo Exclusive content - ‘Demo Selling’

Today Microsoft put out a press release announcing that the demo of PGR4 had hit live. Obviously this is pretty good news for fans of PGR, allowing them a first view of what, based on the previous instalment, had been looking like a pretty guaranteed buy.

Now putting aside the fact that many of the first impressions of this demo that have been filtering through are not exactly glowing, there was another very interesting point in the press release, the fact that the demo contained exclusive content, that would not be available in the full game.

I have to wonder what this is about, a demo is supposed to be a glimpse of the full game to come, the encouragement to go out and buy the final product, yet here is Microsoft effectively trying to sell us the demo. General flow of things is that a demo will provide you a look at what the full game has to offer in order to get you chomping at the bit for the extra content the game will provide, not that the demo gives you more than the final release.

The content in question is an exclusive Nuremberg Snow challenge and arcade events. The only way I can see that this makes sense, is that they are hoping, come the final release people will have enjoyed these elements so much that they start asking for them to be included .This would of course pave the way for some extra downloadable content, which either Microsoft can charge us for (and essentially make us pay for something that they had previously given away for free) or provide for free and claim they are listening to the fans, at which point you would have to wonder why they didn’t just include it in the first place.

The only reason for putting extra sparkles and banners on your demos is to encourage people to play them, are we about to see developers enter into a war of who can provide the most attractive demos?

Posted by Mr-J - October 10th, 2007 -