The odd bit Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is an enemy action.

Game demos: do they really need to be so big?

I'm browsing through forums and the game sections are really filled with posts about a game named Bioshock. I've always been cautious with hyped games, especially since the Doom 3 fiasco. A lot of posts also mentioned a demo being available for Bioshock. Well isn't that a great way to know if you like the game or not before you actually buy it?

So I started looking for the demo and when I found it, I fell off my chair (so to speak of course ). The size of the download is 1850 megabytes. Yes, that's right... nearly 2 gigabytes. A normal internet subscription with my ISP has a monthly download cap of 12 gigabytes. This demo equals 15.1% of that monthly volume. Just to try the game...

I agree that download caps are about the worst thing in broadband land and I'm of the opinion they should be abolished. But I'm also of the opinion that a demo of 2 gigabytes is really over the top. Not too long ago, complete games were smaller than that. The job of a demo is to convince you to buy the full game, but what's the point if the download size is similar to a full game?

And I'll turn this into a teaser for my next post: the ever increasing download sizes for demos are not a sign of increased quality, but an attempt to cover up the downwards spiral that PC gaming is in right now. Stay tuned for that post

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