Me too, I even had a Playstation Underground subscription. The underground demo discs were my favorites since they sometimes had imports on them. Good times......

Piracy is what more and more kills demos of anything. So blame the POS crackers that are the ones ruining the gaming industry. Granted at the end of the day there are plenty of demos on the PSN and XBL (never owned a Wii but I assume there are plenty there). Also iirc, Steam has demos of games, so they are pretty much everywhere. I personally like to demo games, then I check out various review sites and not just the score but the entire thing, otherwise I wouldn't have purchased such fun games like WKC or Dante's Inferno.

=p Haha, I remember that I played the demo from Syphon Filter and was even going so far to shoot all the lights because I thought it was incredible that you could do that....I have for sure spend more than 10 hours in that demo and when I finally got the game I probably spend less time with it;..

Yeah... they're forcing me to read reviews and ask people's opinions about games before buying.

It still sucks. I like demos.

How does piracy kill demos?

Yeah Onlive is great for trying out games, I got Dirt 2 (on steam) because of how fun it was to play (ended up getting a wheel and peddles too) 

I Wish the wii would allow demo's, it's crazy they don't I would of bought a load more games for it.

I would say about 75% of all the PC games I  have was bought based on it's demo

Piracy has not killed demos. It was actually game developers and publishers that killed them, and piracy trived because of this.

The purpose of a demo is to give the player a taste of the game, so, if interested, the player will buy the game. Heck, there were even full PC games that were shipped with a demo disc so that you can give to a friend in order to spread the word. Who knows how many games became popular thanks to these demos. So why did many developers and publishers started to axe them? The answer is simple, making more money.

Because a demo is always free, many more people play the demo that the actual full game. And the reason is simple: if you don't like the demo, you don't buy the game (either the game is bad or is not worth full price). So they chose to axe demos so that the player has to buy the game "if they didn't like the game, it's their problem" policy.

While piracy existed well before demos and even games. It found a golden mine once publishers axed demos. People that don't want to buy a game unless it's really good will download a pirated (cracked, patched, serial, etc) one and play it. I have downloaded games via torrent, but only a few were so good that convinced me to buy them while the majority are uninstalled and thrown away before I even reach the first half of the game (out of boredom).

I favor demos, because i bought many more games with them than with torrent downloads

• Torchlight
• Penimbra series
• Amnesia: The Dark Descent
• Trials: 2 Edition
• Motorbike
• Minecraft
• Trackmania
• etc etc.