CliffyB Flips ‘Grumpy’ PC Gamers A Cheeky Bird

When a Bulletstorm demo was recently given a release date of 25 January, many couldn’t help but notice that a PC version seemed to be missing.
Epic’s Cliff Bleszinski has noticed too. A 14 January twitter post from the man reads “BULLETSTORM DEMO COMING TO 360/PS3 JANUARY 25th. In other news, PC gamers are grumpy about this.” It’s a cute way to suggest PC fans are taking this a bit too seriously – but they do have cause to be a little miffed.
Back in July, Epic’s Mark Rein claimed that Bulletstorm would be a title that would “firmly” re-establish the company on the platform. “I think that’s a myth that we’ve abandoned the PC, it’s just not true,” he said. A missing demo certainly wouldn’t constitute the PC being ‘abandoned,’ but it does suggest that the platform is being treated as something of an afterthought.
It’s also worth remembering that Epic Megagames (along with id Software) pioneered the ‘shareware’ approach to software sales in the 1990s. This, essentially, was an early ‘try before you buy’ system and played a major role in catapulting the developers’ games to widespread success.
Bulletstorm may well turn out to be great on the PC. Or it may be just another in a long line of sloppy console ports. The point is, it would be nice if players could find out for themselves with a demo before having to shell out money on the game.
Epic has yet to either confirm or deny that the PC will be receiving a demo at a later date.