It’s not the developers or publishers who are supposedly responsible for implementing the demos required by Sony, but the PlayStation Store itself, which creates them in-house…
The background to this could be that any developer or publisher who sells their games wholesale for $34 or more for a PlayStation Store presence is rumoured to be required to make demos of them for players who subscribe to PlayStation Plus Premium. Two interesting facts: PlayStation VR games are not affected (PSVR2…?), and there is no retroactive obligation to do so for creators of existing titles.
The demos are supposed to be available three months after the game’s release, too, but Sony would manage these on its own so that the company would be responsible for the limited-time products. According to Ethan Gach, writing for Kotaku, while the rule does not give extra work to the developer, many have expressed concern that Sony has relegated demos to the most expensive PlayStation Plus category, and that the developers may not benefit from the resulting revenue… but the opposite is also true: if you have fun with the trial version, you’re more likely to buy the whole game.
Meanwhile, Garrett Fredley, a senior engineer at Sony, has blown up the internet by announcing that he has joined the PlayStation game preservation team. It’s still questionable how much of a role he will play in the emulation work, but if it comes up as a topic within the team, he will share it with us, as he’s only been part of this band for a few days, it’s still very early days for the game archiving band.
It’s not sure that PlayStation’s game archiving division is working on the previously rumoured local PlayStation 3 emulation, which would mean that PlayStation 5 owners wouldn’t have to play the titles from two console generations before from the cloud, but would instead rely on the PS5’s capabilities rather than the internet to play, say, Killzone 3 (a random example!).
Game preservation consists of several phases. There are several builds of a game (alpha, beta, release candidate, updated versions), all of which need to be saved. You have to catalogue the uncompiled assets and the documentation, which means a ton of data for a significant game. Still, the result is an easy-to-understand development roadmap overview. The source code will be available, making it easier to emulate or port the game to another system…
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