Several gaming sites joined an alliance protesting against exclusive demo releases and seeking to promote the broadest available means of giving consumers access to samples of games before they make a purchase:
- In the gaming industry, the free, playable demo is one of the most popular and powerful tools to interest gamers in a product. Production and testing of a demo can also take significant resources out of a development team. It therefore seems logical to expect publishers will maximize the game"s exposure by giving the demo the widest possible release.
Unfortunately, this isn"t always the case, and sometimes a demo is given to one site for several days or even a week. The marketing perception that this creates good exposure for the pertaining demo is a misconception, as enthusiast gamers resent having only one, crowded choice from which to download. And all file hosting sites, including the ones listed below, simply won"t mention the demo at all, thus limiting its exposure to general news sites only.
Promotions like this help only one website at the expense of alienating the enthusiast community which makes up a large chunk of the overall audience and download traffic. It absolutely hurts the industry at large more than it can help a single relationship.