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Nintendo Is Responsible For Limited Use Demos

by Mike Futter on Jun 05, 2013 at 06:15 AM

The 3DS is becoming a hotbed of wonderful and unique experiences. This year alone has seen the fantastic Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, a great portable Monster Hunter, and challenging strategy with Fire Emblem: Awakening. One of the next big titles, Project X Zone (a collaboration between Capcom, Namco Bandai, and Sega) arrives on June 25, but the demo is available now.

Unfortunately, when we added the trial to our consoles, we noticed that it can only be activated a total of five times. With three weeks to go before the title's release, that puts us in a tough position as we try to figure out how to space out or time with the crazy character mashup. We also wanted to know exactly why this is the case.

We reached out to Nintendo to find out and were given a surprising answer. We asked if this was a requirement on their side or something up to the publishers. We were told, "We don't discuss our internal business practices."

So, we tried another approach. We asked what the benefit was to limiting the number of demo uses. We still got nothing, and we were told that Nintendo would not share anything else with us about the matter.

Instead, we reached out to a publisher who has had multiple use-limited demos just to get the story. We were told that the requirement comes from Nintendo. For some reason though, they weren't willing to admit that or tell us why.

Either way, just be judicious with your demo uses. Once they run out, you're stuck waiting for the full game to release. And based on this opening cinematic and these videos, there should be something to love in here for most video game fans.