Sony will force all full-price games to have demos on PS Plus Premium claims report

metro.co.uk:

PS Plus Premium will be offering time-limited game trails for every major new release, according to newly leaked developer guidelines.

Although Sony briefly mentioned game demos as being a part of PlayStation Plus Premium, like most things to do with the revamped service they haven’t explained the feature in detail yet. However, a new leak suggests that time-limited game trails will be required for any new game on PlayStation 5 or 4, so that it can be offered as an exclusive feature for PS Plus Premium.

PS Plus Premium is the most expensive of the three new tiers of the service and will cost £13.49 a month or £99.99 a year. It includes all the benefits of the other two tiers, plus dozens of retro games for the PlayStation 1, 2, 3, and Portable.

Although there’s no official confirmation of how the demos will work, supposed Sony has started telling companies that they are required to provide a demo that lasts at least two hours for any game that costs over $34 (£27).

After that, the demo has to be kept available for at least 12 months, although apparently there is some wriggle room with the rules, as long as the publisher provides at least something.

This won’t apply to any existing games but any new game released for PlayStation will have to be made with this in mind, although it can be released up to three months after the game launches.

If the leak from website Game Developer is accurate this will be a major change in how developers (who generally hate having to take time out to make demos) operate and it’ll be interesting to see if Microsoft copies the same idea.

Playable demos used to be commonplace during the Xbox 360 era and were at one time mandated by Microsoft for every new game, until publishers discovered that playing