Sony's New "Degradable" Game Demo Patent Revealed

[sjenkins32-1]

Kotaku (http://kotaku.com/5486262/sonys-degradable-video-game-demo-patent) reports, that Sony has patented a new form of trial or demo for video games that, rather than presenting us with a small piece of a title, gives us the whole thing, then takes parts away as time goes on.

After playing a demo for a certain amount of time, or having completed a set number of turns or actions, the product would begin to gradually remove content, eventually compelling the consumer to buy the game in order to keep playing.

Another scenario is the one above, in which a driving game's tracks are removed one by one over a certain amount of races.

Sounds interesting, but these demos would take up alot of space, unless Sony goes back to to disc-based demos.

Click the Headline for the Image.

[pwnophobia]

http://www.411mania.com/game_article_pictures/11580.jpg

[Capt_Thad]

huh That's kind of a cool idea. I'd have to see it in action though to see if it's really worth it. With the rapidly increasing size of hard drives, I don't see space as being an issue for much longer... and it certainly wouldn't be an issue with DD titles that you'd be downloading whole anyway.

[waldo]

I realize that you are just linking from another site that provides absolutely no context, but I can't tell them they are idiots. Even though they do not provide any link to what they are talking about, if you actually go to the Patent Office and look, you will see that this is a published APPLICATION. This is not a patent. This has not been patented. Sony does not have a right to anything at this point other than being able to say patent pending. There is nothing that says this will ever be issued as a patent.

[Fortyseven]

Eeh. This is a just a crappy gimmick. I sound like a cynical prick when I say this, but I swear this comes off like some dipshit justifying their employment. :P

[TeeCakes]

Might cut down on pirated software. Assuming of course there are any who honestly pirate just to 'try before they buy'.

[Anenome]

Not sure this idea improves much of anything. Demos aren't broken. This doesn't seem to fix them.

If anything, removing content would make be both frustrated and angry, and therefore less likely to buy.

When I play a demo and love it, and then end up playing it over and over and over--that's when I decide I simply have to buy the actual game (this happened last with L4D2). If the demo had started removing content, that would not have convinced me to buy the game at all.

[wasd]

After reading this, I thought of all the games that have 5-6 hours of gameplay and couldn't help but wonder if I would need to buy the game to finish it.

Most games aren't really worth playing through more than once.

[lockwoodx]

http://i48.tinypic.com/15yc6dd.jpg

[PacerDawn]

The Just Cause 2 demo has an open world demo, but it expires after 30 minutes, so it looks like they are thinking along the same lines.

Not that the demo would get me to buy that game, though. Save points, rather than save anywhere, in an open world game = fail. A shame because I was set to buy this on day 1 too. Ah well...

[Valkyrist]

IF this gets implemented, it will be very limited. A large portion of games out these days are so shallow, that you can play though once and just be done with it.

Maybe I'm just weird, but I've never bought that an unlocked "Hard Mode" = replayability. Off the top of my head, Bayonetta calls out. You play once though, and sure you missed a few things, but it's not really worth the time and effort to do it all over again. Not when there's so many good games out these days.

I dunno. Maybe it would work for Sports games, or a Rock Band game where each song disappears after one play.

/shrug

[Anenome]

That's better than the old NES days where replaying the damn game was FORCED on you because of insane difficulty and extremely limited lives and continues. I'm looking at you, Ninja Gaiden TWO!!! Today you can see a section of a game once and never see it again. Not so with the NES days. You'd see it a dozen times at least, often.

uB6XeZrYjf0

By the time you've beaten some of these old difficult NES games you've already played through the entire game about 37 times, no joke. Often, in NG2, you're just playing the entire game through, yet again, to get more experience in on the next boss you're up to. And damn if you aren't motivated to be a quick study. You had every single section of that game memorized, not only what paths you'd take, but what weapon you picked up and where, how many lives you needed to have by a certain point, where the 1-up pickups were, and how you planned to get past some of the insanely difficult platforming.

Blaster Master was also an offender, and much more of a pleasure to play than NG2, grrr, and therefore gets a pass (and is my fav NES game of all time).

I sometimes try to imagine a modern game made with the difficulty of an old-style NES game. Some games achieve it. Like, some games have a mode beyond ultra-hard where dying even once ends the game. That's awesome. But I never play those modes :P

[Samstag]

I can see this being very cool for racing games. You'd get to demo the cars and tracks you're most interested in using the settings you prefer.

It'd certainly be a step up from that garbage GT5 demo with 1 car, 1 track, and forcing us to play with traction control, abs, and training wheels.

[gojira]

Is this really patentable? Surely there are some demos out there that remove some capability over time? And what to stop the user from making a copy of the original and just continuing to re-install and play that?

[Anenome]

I can see this being very cool for racing games. You'd get to demo the cars and tracks you're most interested in using the settings you prefer.

I don't think you guys are understanding this properly. Do you really think you're going to get access to the whole game at first?

What's inevitably going to happen is you get everything you would normally get with a regular demo. A few cars, a few tracks. Then, as the game keeps track of your playing of the demo, at a certain point it considers you 'hooked' and begins removing features, at which point a pop-up tells you that X feature has expired, and encourages you to purchase the game. This happens about 10 times over the next several plays, at which point the whole demo expires. Congratulations, you've been screwed by Sony yet again.

[Capt_Thad]

I don't think you guys are understanding this properly. Do you really think you're going to get access to the whole game at first?

From the site:

A patent filed by SCEA details a system that gives users a full or nearly complete game to play with, but slowly removes features until you buy it.

The software has customizable triggers that disable features after a set number of plays or lapsed play time.

http://www.siliconera.com/2010/03/04/sony-patents-degradable-video-game-demos/

The whole principle is that you get a full release (or whatever is full at the time of the demo release), and it degrades as you use it. That's the patent anyway. We're just talking about the idea, not how people will fail to live up to it in the future. We can save that for the threads that actually talk about the system in use.

[blackzc]

That's better than the old NES days where replaying the damn game was FORCED on you because of insane difficulty and extremely limited lives and continues. I'm looking at you, Ninja Gaiden TWO!!!


I know what you mean but with the exception of ninja gaiden 2, i can still to this day own the hell out of it.

[Samstag]

I don't think you guys are understanding this properly. Do you really think you're going to get access to the whole game at first?

I don't think you're understanding just how limited and awful the GT5 demo was. I'll take the opening hour of career mode over the crap they stuck me with any day of the week.

And generally a GT game is going to give you access to a lot of cool stuff through time trials right away even if the career mode locks you into a cheap car and kiddie tracks.

[Anenome]

The whole principle is that you get a full release (or whatever is full at the time of the demo release), and it degrades as you use it. That's the patent anyway. We're just talking about the idea, not how people will fail to live up to it in the future. We can save that for the threads that actually talk about the system in use.
Yeah, I get that that's what the patent says, my claim is that that's not how the patent's going to be used. Do you imagine you're going to get to play through the whole game? No, never. So it's not the whole game, but they cover their bases on the patent by tossing that in there. 100% of the demos using this patent will feature the partial game, and either the same amount of content we're used to seeing in a demo, or marginally more which quickly retreats.

[Anenome]

I don't think you're understanding just how limited and awful the GT5 demo was. I'll take the opening hour of career mode over the crap they stuck me with any day of the week.
You're right, I don't. It's just that someone used a car analogy, so I used one as well. Didn't realize I was tying myself to that specific game by it.

[reptilezero]

That's better than the old NES days where replaying the damn game was FORCED on you because of insane difficulty and extremely limited lives and continues. I'm looking at you, Ninja Gaiden TWO!!! Today you can see a section of a game once and never see it again. Not so with the NES days. You'd see it a dozen times at least, often.


ninja gaiden 2 was the only one in the series i could beat :\ ninja gaiden 3 was really, really hard, though. i can't imagine anyone actually making it through that game.

[Anenome]

ninja gaiden 2 was the only one in the series i could beat :\ ninja gaiden 3 was really, really hard, though. i can't imagine anyone actually making it through that game.
Then this will make you shed tears ^_~

14 minute speedrun of Ninja Gaiden III:

http://speeddemosarchive.com/NinjaGaiden3.html

[Anenome]

Actually, I went back and looked em up, it was NG1 whose last boss frustrated me so greatly. Never much played the sequels.

[reptilezero]

wow he made it look too easy. maybe i should go back and try that game again. i never beat part 1 either. was a really hard game.

[Anenome]

The most entertaining speedrun of the group was NGIII. You see him really taking a lot of risks. He takes a lot of hits in order to to get the bump the results, which he uses to skip a lot of platforming, and even timed his jumps to perfectly hit an incoming missile which bumps him onto a ledge and saves him from dying. At one point he gets down to a single health point and takes on a boss.

That's just one example too, there were all kinds of crazy things he did that surprised me with their creativity. And, it's also clear that part III has been created specifically to be a challenging platformer :P That's annoying, and makes the run all the more special and amazing.