As a die hard fan of all things Final Fantasy, the last several months have been excruciatingly painful regarding the slapstick clusterfu** logic that Square has been applying to it's upcoming...*ahem*...polymorphic (love that word.)entertainment event, that is Final Fantasy XIII. I hope I'm not coming off like a troll, especially after my last vocal post. At the tail end of that discussion I laid out what I thought was the worst case scenario regarding the FFXIII demo:

"Regarding the length of it being two hours. That seems quite promising, but I wonder if the length of the demo will now give them reason to justify not releasing a free digital release."

I logged on to Kotaku today and stared dumbfounded: http://kotaku.com/5044603/final-fantasy-xiii-demo-may-be-pay-to-play

The Kotaku article points out some fairness regarding the demo. People did pay for a Spore Creature creator. Hell, I admit too that I own a copy of Zone of the Enders because of a certain MGS2 demo. And over two hours is incredibly generous for a demo.

But the Spore creature creator can be used in conjunction with the full retail product... And the MGS2 demo was released during a more simpler time. When consoles didn't have harddrives... or were connected to the series of tubes called "the internet's" and didn't have tailored made online marketplaces and networks for simple digital distribution. Granted fans will always put down cash for stuff regarding what they like, but after several years using Live Marketplace... Or even good old PSN... Will anyone actually bother putting down cash for this?

For a demo? That you should be getting for free.

Thoughts?

Unless the demo is of the first two hours of gameplay and it lets me move a save over to the completed retail copy, then no I would not pay for a demo.

Demos should be free little pieces of the game to convince me to buy the game. If I am going to invest a demo, I might as well just buy the whole game.

this is retarded.  Next they will start charging for vids.

Square has made some very poor decisions lately, and this doesn't surprise me one bit.

"Square has made some very poor decisions lately, and this doesn't surprise me one bit."

Well Square Enix needs to make the moneys for the honeys, if you know what I mean.
I think you're a dumb ass if you pay for a demo. Yes, I'm looking at you Spore creature creator buyers.

"Well Square Enix needs to make the moneys for the honeys, if you know what I mean.
I think you're a dumb ass if you pay for a demo. Yes, I'm looking at you Spore creature creator buyers."

ahhh, its all marketing.

Demos are to get people to try and buy the game, I dont understand where the idea of selling betas/demos came from. You shouldnt have to pay to be advertised to.

"hmmm, what other poor decision are you talking about?"

The whole purpose of a demo is to make sure you don't waste your money
Sounds stupid as hell
Unless there's a demo...for......the...........demo?

Yeah, this is slightly retarded.. I guess it would be amusing if the entire demo was a bunch of cutscenes, wouldn't surprise me.

"Yeah, this is slightly retarded.. I guess it would be amusing if the entire demo was a bunch of cutscenes, wouldn't surprise me."

I could be wrong about this, but for a long time I've been hearing Square Enix was having financial issues? Due to long development cycles, etc...
This could be their way to try and cope with these issues. I'm also rather curious how the Japanese market will react to a pay-to-download demo.

As a gamer who doesn't get off to anime-like sequences and guys who look rather feminine clashing swords together...