Demos, we all love them, they give us fence-sitters the ability to have a little taste of the game to decide if we want to hand over our hard-earned Shekels or not.
Following in the footsteps of PlayStation, Valve is testing out a new feature surrounding demos; a timed trial of a full game.
Starting with the recently launched Dead Space remake, you can now play the full game on Steam, for free, for a whole 90 minutes. All you need to do is download it and hit play. Any progress made during the timed trial is carried over if you decide to buy the game.
Time trial demos offer up a different kind of flavour to the traditional demo. Traditional demos are usually created by the developer to showcase what you would be experiencing in the full game; all jam-packed into one bite-sized little cookie. A timed trial allows us to get the full game experience, unfiltered and in your face.
It’s worth mentioning that Dead Space is currently on special, so the timed trial feature may just be used to boost sales of games that are going for a discounted price, but even then, I still appreciate that I can give the game a spin.
Depending on how successful this feature is, it could mean most, if not all, bigger titles will start seeing a timed trial button show up on their Steam page.
The timed trial for Dead Space will run until the 29th of May, so if you’ve been thinking about getting it, maybe give it a test drive first.