The latest several PC games listed at metacritic.com have no gameplay demo available.
Is this a trend?
-FrL-
I think so. Even with cable and broadband becoming the norm, there’s still a good number of people who aren’t going to want to download 2 or 3 gigs on their DSL or dial-up. Perhaps more importantly, there ain’t too many free sites that’ll put up the bandwidth for a popular multi-gig file.
Also, a bunch of the games at the top there are open-world shooters, which don’t demo easily at all. I remember the head of the Far Cry 2 team said this was the reason he wasn’t releasing a demo; in order to make the demo small enough that it wouldn’t consist of giving the game away for free, they would have to cut the size of the map down to the point where it wouldn’t give players any idea of what the the full game would be like.
I could definitely see this becoming a trend, now that open-world RPGs and shooters can get greenlit by publishers without any hassle.
There is also the cost of development of said demo. It’s not insignificant and a lot of studios choose to instead spend the time debugging the game (which I appreciate it) or working on downloadable content, and the publishers would rather spend the money on other types of marketing, I’m sure.