Exclusive Demo Releases
Ourselves at Fileshack, the guys at 3DGamers, and many other file pages have received a cease and desist order from Ubi Soft authored by GameSpy asking us to remove the Raven Shield demo. GameSpy has a signed exclusive arrangement with Ubi Soft so the Ubi Soft community manager is stuck with the job of trying to enforce this. We would like to apologize to Shack readers for not being able to serve the demo to the public until the 21st. Exclusive demo releases have always been a sore spot for gamers online, and luckily for us we have made some very tremendous strides in eliminating this practice. I have in fact just finished talks with EA games today and we will be sporting files such as the Sims Online playtest and Earth & Beyond playtest among many other files. (You may recall the Spearhead demo was slated as an exclusive demo release, but we got to EA and got that changed) I have gotten similar commitments from other major publishers. Exclusive file arrangements hurt companies, hurt gamers, and only feed bitterness among communities and between enthusiast websites and publishers. We are working very hard to share with publishers the frustrations of gamers that practices like this cause. Well the rough ride is nearly complete, and you almost certainly wont see something like this from Ubi Soft or many other publishers much longer, if at all.
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Fucking Gamespy :(
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