Crytek: Free Game Demos Might Disappear

Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli has stated that we might see free game demos disappearing before too long.Speaking to Develop, Yerli commented that he was unsure whether or not we’d see a demo of Crysis 2, and that lack of demos is a trend that will likely continue.”A free demo is a luxury we have in the game industry that we don’t have in other industries such as film,” said Yerli. “The reality is that we might not see any free game demos in the long term.”“I think that we’ll see more and more games not carrying a demo in future, because it become prohibitively expensive,” he continued. “Also, given the time pressures in making a demo – in fact given the time pressure of making a quality demo – I think it all becomes really difficult to work with, and I think we’ll see less and less of them in the future.”It’s not all doom and gloom, however, with Yerli hinting that something else might be in the works. When commenting on a strategy that publisher EA has previously outlined to sell premium demos, Yerli noted “The problem with any new strategy like this is it initially may appear as a blood-hungry, money-grabbing strategy. But I think there is a genuine interest here to give gamers something more than a small demo released for free.”What are your thoughts, readers? It’s certainly true that plenty of games don’t have demos now, and the demos we do have are 20-minute, 1.5GB monstrosities as compared to the shareware of old which gave a full third of the game for free, but is this a big problem? Would you pay for sizeable demos, perhaps if they – as with episodic games – contained the first few hours of content? Let us know in the comments below.