Originally Posted By: Dignan
All good advice. I'll think about those. Is there a demo of Bioshock Infinite available? I certainly don't want to shell out $60 for a game I can't play. I didn't try out Portal until it was either free or very cheap on one of those Steam sales, and I got Half Life 2 very inexpensively as well...


I don't believe there's a Bioshock Infinite demo, and I don't think there will be. In fact, I think right now we are seeing a sudden change in the industry. 2013 will be the year that all games stopped having demos.

(When I say all games, I mean, the triple-A titles like Bioshock Infinite where you buy a game on a disc and play that game. I don't mean games that do the free-to-play model with monetization via microtransactions within the game.)

The reason game demos will stop this year is because of this single youtube video. The relevant section starts around ten minutes into the presentation:



I find this very interesting because it turns the industry on its head. It was previously assumed to be common sense that you could sell more games by releasing a playable demo. The shareware game industry was build on that model, and it's even hard-coded into the Xbox (you can't release an Xbox Live Arcade title without a playable demo, it's hard-coded into the UI). It's amazing that it took this long before anyone actually looked at statistics on it.
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Tony Fabris