I remember the days when I used to get gaming magazines with demo disks. I’m that ancient. We have come full circle because game demos have become the new buzz all of the sudden. What is so remarkable, is that even though the concept of game demos have been around a long time, Sony still manages to muck it up.

‘Game Trials,’ as Sony calls it is only available in the UK on two titles, Death Stranding Director’s Cut and Sackboy: A Big Adventure.

For the Death Stranding trial, you receive six hours of playtime, whereas in the Sackboy trial, you get five hours. However, the big caveat is that the timer starts the moment you hit the download button. This is a horrible user experience because it takes literally hours to download Death Stranding.

A writer at Eurogamer began downloading the Death Stranding trial and reports that his PS5 estimates two hours to download enough data to start playing, and three hours to download the entire game. You can do the math, but half the trial’s time is spent on downloading.

There’s also a lot of additional fine print from Sony that Eurogamer does a great job capturing. All in all, it’s just a very amusing tale of Sony not thinking something through entirely and rushing something that out that isn’t quite ready, even though it’s just a trial or their, “trial” service.

[Source: Eurogamer]