With people getting a shorter and short attention spans for games, and a maturing age for the average gamer who are finding less and less time to devote on games, can you see a lot of people just depending on game demos for entertainment? I can see it happening..
Consider the game demo from Splinter Cell with a generous 3 entire levels for you to play with. That's 3 entire levels! Some games I don't even finish a few levels before I get bored.. There's the Postal 2 demo that was just released, and currently there's a patch which gets rid of the 7 minute time limit. I'm sure you can have a good hour or two with just that demo. (on another note, don't expect to see that game appearing on our shelves too soon [;)]). A lot of games have playable online levels too (Unreal Tournment 2, and well, a lot of other FPS's). How long does it take to finish an average game? 11-15 hours?.. You could just download one of those demos instead and play for longer. Or sign up as a beta for a MMORPG.. Check up on gamershell.com or shacknews.com and you can find demos to intersting games everyweek. If you have broadband, and if you don't care for all the other stuff that a complete game has to offer (like story, the satisfaction of 'beating' a game etc), then you're set!
I got this from Ausgamers.com..
quote:Players will NOT need Return to Castle Wolfenstein to play Enemy Territory (or the ET test we're releasing soon). ET is a free
stand-alone game, so anyone who wants to play will be able to download.
How cool is that?! [:)] I'll definately be getting it. I wonder why it's being released for free though..
That's an interesting idea Souri, although if you follow the logic, and play some game - Postal 2 for instance for several hours in the same set of levels, surely that would make you want to buy the full game and play around with the rest of the game for longer than you normally would?
Personally i've played certain demos for a while, but usually the one's I like are RTS's, and their demos are locked in some other way (like a turn limit for M.A.X.) - although using a C&C hack I could get every single unit in the original C&C demo.
The other thing is I think developers are starting to add more content to their games, thus allowing for people to play longer than the 11-15 hours for a regular FPS game now. Well at least I hope that is what they are doing.