There do exist examples where the demo is noticeably worse than the final product. Xcom being one of the more recent examples. From memory also, God of War 3s demo is hideous compared to the final product.

Well one thing I will say about all of this is that developers need to stop releaseing a public beta and call it a beta a few weeks before release and then calling it a beta. It is basically a demo because you aren't going to fix anything in that amount of time.

Totally agree, I just went and got hold of the God of War 3 demo as I hadn't played it before and yes it's a different game. But in this gen, there's likely what around 5 or 6 games where the demo was nowhere near as good as the final game or didn't give a pretty accurate impression of the game.

That's my point in essence.

There's always this..."The demo isn't good, but let's wait for the final game to pass judgement".

When there has been at least 500 games released this gen for the PS3/Xbox 360 combined, you're talking about a 1% chance of the game actually being worth playing if the demo wasn't, not a scientific analysis of course but it's around that figure.

I'm not sure where this stems from, maybe the it's those stupid previews that also do a similar thing, in fact they are even worse. Preview will rarely say a game is bad until release, when it was obvious it was going to be bad. If the preview code was absolutely awful then sometimes the previewer will actually say it's not looking good...but then wait for it..."Let's wait for the final review code before passing judgement".

I mean, what on earth?

I blame advertising, the previewer doesn't want to wright off the game because it will cause a negative business reciprocation from the publisher, this attitude then passes on to stupid gamers.