14 DAY TRIAL // Once upon a time, gamers had the option to try out a portion of a game before committing to a purchase, by downloading a demo version of the title in question.
Nowadays, due to the hassles involved with developing what is essentially a separate product, with separate QA and development cycles assigned to it, instead of hammering down on the main project, publishers gave them up.
Many gamers still want them though, as they feel that resorting to other people's reviews and the general consensus of Metacritic or Steam review scores is not representative of a game's value to a particular individual.
Sure, the surge of Let's Play videos and Twitch streaming sessions means that oftentimes you can actually get to see the game being played, but there's nothing like the experience of getting your own hands on the game and getting a feel for how it moves, not to mention being able to explore it at your own pace, instead of following someone else's gaming sessions.
Game demos are making a comeback
GameSessions is a website that attempts to revive the demo, from which you can download entire games and play them from the beginning for a set period of time, of around an hour, after which you are able to pay to unlock the game on Steam and keep going from where you were, or to rent access for a longer trial period.
For the time being, the service only hosts 15 games, with 5 more scheduled for unlock soon, but its creators say that they have over 50 additional ones contracted and waiting to be integrated with their software, and that they expect to reach around 100 playable titles by this summer.
There are ten publishers committed to supporting the service for now, but the team behind GameSessions is optimistic because nobody has refused them so far.
One of the cornerstones of the service is the fact that GameSesssions is founded on research conducted at the University of Bradford, on a series of asset compression tools that render downloads around a third of their usual size, which allows gamers to get hold of games at unprecedented speeds.
Compression is very important to the economics of doing trial versions of video games that can end up weighing in excess of 50GB, but in the end, it's a tool that also allows gamers with mid-tier rigs to test how a certain video game works on their system without having to potentially waste any money in the process.
