President of Nintendo Satoru Iwata brought up the idea of automatic game demos when talking to investors today. He proposes a system where users are asked if they would like to receive free demos when setting up online on their devices. Demos would then be pushed automatically to these devices when they are turned on next. He would love to try this on both the 3DS and the Wii U.
I can foresee two potential problems with this idea, however. The first would be the speed with which the demo could be downloaded. While the 3DS and the Wii U both have smaller games than the more advanced platforms, the file size of demos still keeps increasing. Demos over a gigabyte in size are commonplace nowadays and some people still don't have fast enough Internet to grab a file of this size. Developers would have to be more creative in compacting their demos or download speed would have to be increased in some way to make not an issue.
The other problem would be with the storage space itself. The Wii and the 3DS (and I'm assuming the Wii U?) have a fairly small amount of storage memory. On the Wii, Nintendo even encouraged users to delete some of their games to get new ones, instead of just having enough space for all of them. Microsoft and Sony have acknowledged the need for hard drive space and keep increasing the size of internal storage; Nintendo needs to follow suit or they are going to be left in the dust.
Even with these problems, this sounds like the next logical step in the demo chain. I have a deep love for demos, having both bought a game on a demo's merit and changed my mind after seeing it played. The idea of any demos I'm interested in just showing up on my device? Sign me up now!
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