Remember when game demos were a thing? Shockingly, they seem to have disappeared on the new consoles, with the PS4 and Xbox One both having a dire shortage of ways for gamers to actually check games out before they spend their hard earned money on them. Well, Microsoft, it seems, is trying to encourage developers to put more demos online on the Xbox Live store, by now suppoting a new kind of demo- trial and play.
Of course, this is nothing new for Microsoft, who supported this exact same functionality on the Xbox 360 with Xbox Live Arcade games. Mysteriously enough, this feature disappeared on the Xbox One, but now Microsoft seems to have brought it back.
“When Xbox One launched you could do game demos and you could do games. But we didn’t have the functionality that was on Xbox 360 – that ‘trial’ experience where you could download a demo and then convert it to a full version,” Microsoft’s ID@Xbox boss Chris Charla told Eurogamer.
“But now we do. In the same way that we update the Xbox One OS every month, they update the development system every month – or regularly, anyway. So that’s something that we recently turned on. I don’t think we’ve seen any ID@Xbox games yet that have shipped with trials, but we may well in the future. It’s something that’s open to everybody.”
Microsoft has been making incredible efforts recently to reach out to indie game developers after antagonizing them in the latter years of the Xbox 360 and the lead up to Xbox One. This is just another such (highly appreciated) move, and let’s hope it pays dividends for them.