Forget the fact that most demos are now a massive download making it a serious commitment in terms of time to download, and HD real estate.

I hope they take notice to your statements and clean up their act.

I appreciate Microsoft for making available game downloads easily available on their site ( I downloaded Age of Empire series demos without any registration). Recently MS servers seems to be quite fast in terms of downloading.. way ahead than that of CNET and IGN.

Once you’ve created an account with one of the file hosting services – say, Fileshack – that’s all you have to do to download as many files as you want.

Or you can use another site such as http://www.gamershell.com where you don’t have to login and the download is pretty fast.

Fortunately there is choice…

One thought – for a single player demo, I can’t see why they wouldn’t make it freely available without pushing marketing material at you first. One possibility is that the majority of consumers aren’t savvy gamers, and can be sold by marketing (which is why TV ads for games almost never show gameplay, but try to demonstrate a compelling story).

However, for multiplayer demos I can see why they would want to push marketing before giving you access to the game. Sometimes the multiplayer demo is enough, if you don’t have a lot of time to play a game. I would probably care less about upgrading unless I was constantly made aware of all the reasons to do so. Although, they usually force you to see this stuff in the demo anyway, so perhaps my point is moot.

Most likely, executives decided they can get the average consumer to skip the 500mb+ download and just go buy the game if they push enough marketing at them.