PlayStation Games Priced $34 or Higher Reportedly Now Required to Have Time-Limited Game Trials - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 26 April 2022 / 3,393 Views
Developers that are working on games for PlayStation consoles that cost $34 / €33 / ￥4000 or higher are now required to create a time-limited game trial for their games, according to a report from Game Developer.
The game trials will not be required for games that cost less than $34 / €33 / ￥4000 or upcoming PlayStation VR titles.
Sony is giving developers up to three months after a games launch on the PlayStation Store to release their timed trial.
The game trials must be at least two hours long and will be included in the PlayStation Plus Premier tier for a minimum of 12 months.
Sony is also open to releasing custom game demos instead of time-limited game trials, but these will only be approved on a case-by-case basis. Developers are still able to publish free weekends, game trials, or custom demos that can be access by all PlayStation owners.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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This is very pro customer and I hope more companies follow this example
Your right that having a demo can be considered a pro consumer move but, having them locked behind the top tier playstation premium subscription also makes it a poor consumer move.
Must be because it cost money to make things.
I definitely hope more companies get game trials as well, just not this specific example where game trials are tied to the most expensive version of a subscription service.
I would agree, except that these are locked behind an expensive paywall.
Wait so are the trials now free for every user or locked behind the PlayStation Plus Premier tier paywall?
Not very pro consumer if it's the latter.
Nope
Exactly
I wonder if this will lead to a bunch of games pricing at $33
I doubt, the full games are on the 70 realm, and even the smaller ones are 40. Don't think they will launch for 34 just to avoid this.
Do you think they would prefer to lose several million sales just to not make a trial?
But what is the recourse? Let's say call of duty comes out and they decide to not make a trial. The potential punishment wouldn't come for 3 months after launch. Sony will delist the game?
It seems kind of a ridiculous requirement of publishers/developers. And the only benefit is for Sony to fuel their new service. I'll be surprised if this policy lasts.
Lock them out off the developer portal.
Demand a return of the provided development kits.
Refuse to certificate new games from the publisher.
Delist the game in question from the store.
Delist all games of the publisher from the store.
Freeze the wallet to not cash out accumulated or further revenues made by the game.
Freeze the wallet as a whole.
There are plenty of mechanisms for Sony to make publishers do as they say.
Yeah, but are they willing to do that to a big publisher like Activision? They make tons of money from them. Or multiple publishers could decide to not do it. Then what? It just seems like Sony is demanding extra work for something that will only benefit Sony. A lot of times, people get their fill of a game after a demo. From the publisher's perspective, they could see it as harmful to sales. If they wanted demos, they can already make them. But for anyone to access them.
I don't see this policy lasting. Even if it's vaguely better for the consumer, it's a small amount of people. Unless Sony wants to implement these demos themselves, I don't see why developers would comply.
You can bet this have been discussed beforehand with the major publishers. Or how do you think they would have titles on the Deluxe package as well?
Guess on PS4Pro you also expected devs to tell Sony to forget the requirement to have at least same performance as base system.
That's a little different because it does benefit them to have a quality game on both consoles. Then again there's always an example of the exception. Cyberpunk was ok on pro but horrible on base. Sony did delist it, but only after the demand for refunds was getting so strong. Realistically, they shouldn't have let it on the store in the first place.
Maybe I'll be wrong, but I just think this seems like a lot to ask. Maybe it was already discussed. But I'd be surprised if there wasn't at least one major publisher that has huge issues with this policy. Maybe they agreed to it at first, but if it seems like it's affecting their revenue, they'll twist Sony's arm to reverse the policy.
Being okish on Pro but bad on Base doesn't break the requirement of being at least as good on Pro (on aspects of resolution and fps).
If they already agreed (no matter how much took to negotiate) it would really look poor on them to backpedal, and why would you think this would affect their revenue? Unless we are thinking of pretty garbage games bought due to little information I don't think trials would make the sales drop (even more when Sony expects Premium to be a very small subset of their subs, with at most people upgrading to Deluxe, which don't have the trials).
That's exactly it though. Unless Sony is paying extra for them to make these demos, they're spending extra time and money to make these demos. These are the same companies that question whether to port a game to another platform when it's seemingly trivial. But that would actually make additional sales.
Let's put it this way, if they stream the game and have a bad internet connection, they have a bad impression of the game. At least they can play it immediately. If the publisher just programs in a 2 hour timer, the player has to download the entire game to try it. They run the risk of a bug that lets them play the entire game. The third option is the best, but also the most expensive. They would have to cut down the game into an amount of content that the players will need two hours to get through.
Depending on the game, this could be a big headache regardless of the option. I just don't see why developers would be excited about this. If anything they'll do it begrudgingly, but it's going to slowly strain relationships. As far as I know, there's no free way of doing this. Demos were a tool for games before information was easily available about a game online. It just seems pointless from every angle. Extra work for few customers so Sony can prop up their highest subscription package. Sony benefits and no one else does. If demos are so great, why don't they all voluntarily do this for every game?
My understanding is that Sony will handle all of the work creating the demo.
If that's the case, then it's pretty much a non-issue. But the way it read to me is that the developers are required to create it.
That's where I see an issue arising.
They aren't demos, but trials. What is being expected is just that they put the add a "clock" to the game so whoever decides to trial will play the regular game for a limited time.
And do you really think even if having to make a demo, for games that will sell 2-10M units that cost is so high they rather not even put the game on the system?
The publishers not being happy I can agree is a possibility, they deciding to skip PS5 just to not make it I don't think will happen for any game that is expected to have good sales.
If the goal is to eliminate developers with limited resources or lower quality games, then it's a good strategy.
But for those that submit to the terms, why wouldn't they just put the demo/trial/whatever on the store for free? They already went through the effort of creating it. It's because most people would play the game for 2 hours and put it down forever. And I don't mean people on this site. I mean the typical ps5 owner. The mainstream, casual market.
But I'll concede one point. Assuming they get a cut of the subscription, the developers probably would make more money from people trying the games and never buying them since a huge portion of the userbase buys few games during the time owning the console. So they might fire up the demo, but they were never going to buy the game. The counterargument is that this type of customer probably wasn't subscribed to ps now anyway.
I think we have to just agree to disagree. To me, this is going to be a hard pill to swallow for developers unless they're getting a lot of money from the subscription.
Lower quality games and limited developers shouldn't be charging 70USD for their games so they will likely fit well on the under 34USD that Indies get. But that would be the opposite end of your claim on CoD level games pressuring Sony.
In the past it was common to see free demos and those on PC Magazines, probably something that was seem as not bringing enough customers to justify the cost, have to see what Sony have offered or if just forced.
All published games have approval from Sony to enter the store or be printed, and in such there are steps they need to send material and get go aheads, etc... call it certification process, if a dev would show as unwilling to obey the rules they wouldn't be able to put their process on console anymore. Sure you can claim a dev can buy a fight and say they won't do and if Sony want they can go to hell either not caring about losing sales or that Sony wouldn't dare lose that royalties, I doubt a case like that would occur.
Forcing developers to do this while only providing it on the highest tier is a bad taste. Don't they have confidence in their offering?
Game trials are cool and I think bringing them back is a good move. But putting them behind a paywall isn't the way. This should be a free feature.
Great stuff well done Sony for implementing good policies
I approve of this message. I wish it were for all games, though.
That will be a food thing for people that want to try games, 2h can give enough impression.
A return of demos
There surely was no shortage of demos in the last few years.
I find this overly complicated and useless and will have an impact on devs. Why not just refund people if they haven't played the game for more than 2 hours ?
Trialing many games to see if you want it is not the same a buying many games and individually trying to get a refund back for all of them.
This should be seen as means for people to try out experiences that wouldn't have otherwise play or are uncertain on. Implementations could be fairly simple if users are forced to download the whole game and the trial just locks off after X amount of time.
Surely giving a time limited trial for a game 3 months after the release isn't going to work. They should be done at release as this will benefit sales of the game and the tier.
These trials take time to develop, maybe a couple years down the line it will be a launch requirement. But it would be unrealistic to announce this and expect games that are launching soon to be able to release on time. with the trial.
I was thinking of those old game demos, or demos they would do for E3 etc. I've seen Devs talk about how it can add quite a bit to development time just to make so I don't know how easy or simple it would be.
Yeah, but if you're a consumer that's choosing to wait, Sony is still making money off of you regardless if the game launches in a complete mess since Game Trials are tied to the most expensive tier only. It comes off as both pro consumer and anti-consumer.
I would've preferred if Sony just adopted Xbox, Steam, and EGS refund policies. I've gotten my money back on so many games that have turned out to be crap over the years on Steam without having to pay monthly.
As anyone would
Not the best way to do it but I'm just glad for the trial period. I think Xbox still lets you refund under 2 hours so they already have it in a way same with Steam.
This is a great move for people in the tier trials are included in, but LOL @ the idea that it is “pro consumer”. It’s locked behind a premium subscription tier.
Are the cloud saves that require PS+ also “pro consumer”?
I mean, he's not wrong lol. I was shocked when I got my PS5 and found out I had to pay for cloud saves. Coming from PC, I couldn't imagine paying for a basic feature like that before and to find out there's a limit to your paid cloud saves on PlayStation lol. Not even Nintendo has a cloud save limit for their paid storage and Xbox doesn't even charge anything for unlimited cloud saves.
But paying $18/month or $120/year just to try out a game so you can then spend an additional $60-$70 to buy the game is absurd. I imagine most will subscribe to Premium for the legacy games, which I'm also not a huge fan of paywalling in the name of game preservation.
Instead of console warrior shit posting, tell me where I am wrong.
Pro consumer is locking netflix and f2p behind a paywall =p
Talk about old news lol. Maybe keep it relevant to what is going on now.
Yeah I deleted this comment when I realized Nintendo's game trials are on a $20/year plan whereas Sony's game trials are only available on the $18/month or $120/year plan lol.
Nintendo should definitely expand it further though. Maybe even adding game trials to all games on the Expansion Pack even.
Microsoft does have this. It's called a good refund policy. All Sony has to do is match Xbox, steam, and Epic's refund policy then this will be unnecessary.
Yeah you're right, I didn't read it right that it was behind a paywall. So it actually kind of hurts devs and consumers to a point. But return policies like Steam's do need to take into account that some games take less than 2 hours to beat and can end up ruining a developer. That happens few and far between but that's why I didn't want to immediately bring up Steam's RP.
agree!
Essay Pro