Sega Cancels Yakuza 6 Song of Life Free Demo After Gamers Unlocked Full Game (businessinsider.com)

Sega pulled the highly anticipated "Yakuza 6: The Song of Life" demo this week from the PlayStation Store after discovering some players had inadvertently gained access to the full game using the demo. From a report: This discovery came only hours after the demo was initially released for PlayStation 4. The Japanese video game company tweeted, "We are as upset as you are, and had hoped to have this demo available for everyone today. We discovered that some were able to use the demo to unlock the full game." [...] When the demo was initially released it required more than 36 GB of storage, to the surprise of many video game critics. Kotaku, an online entertainment publication, suggests that the demo was so large because it actually contained the entire game, but was supposed to restrict everything beyond the first few stages of the game.

Comments

Return to the Shareware format

[Quakeulf]

It worked in the past, it could possibly work again if you tried it.

Re:Return to the Shareware format

[TWX]

I have some rather fond memories of a summer computer repair course that the school district paid-for that recruited a couple of us from each high school to attend. The class itself was mostly meaningless when it came to the hands-on part as we all had a lot of personal experience already, so on the first day when we realized the trainer computers had NE2000-compatible ethernet cards, at lunch we went to one guy's house for Quake Test, and to my house for T-connectors, BNC cable, terminators, and TSRs for the NICs, and we networked the computers and played the demo of quake (without sound) for the duration of the hands-on portion of the class.

id was fairly smart, they probably made more sales because of how widely shared and eventually how widely pirated their games were since that distribution made their titles known. Everyone wanted to play Quake because so many people were already playing it.

Lazy developers?

[mark-t]

If it was supposed to be a demo version, then what the fuck was the full version doing there?

I get that you want to build them both from the same codebase, but that's what #ifdef is for.

par for the course

[nimbius]

from the company that once knowingly and intentionally installed a spyware trojan on their customers computers.

Wow, that's lazy...

[Ecuador]

I have a technical app on the app store (telescope polar alignment), with a free version missing some extra tools and a paid version. I make sure I keep it light in case someone needs to download it from a remote location and, even though both are built from the same project, I make sure the extra stuff is not included in the free package, so that it is 10MB instead of 20MB...
But just throwing the entire 3GB game as a demo, that sure is lazy! An since they are that lazy, the were predictably lazy with the way they implemented the limitation so people got around it. Congrats.

Re:Basically that

[pak9rabid]

(Though I've read somewhere that Id *DID* make the same blunder with the shareware CD of Quake1. There was only a simple registration procedure that was supposed to unlock the full commercial game with extra episodes out of the shareware CD, the same way here the full Yakuza6 can apparently be unlocked out of free 36GB demo).

You read correct. The Quake I shareware CD not only contained the full version of Quake, but also full versions of the entire id FPS library at the time (Doom, Doom II, Heretic, and I think even Hexen), all made available for free by using a little utility called 'qcrack'. Man, discovering that was like discovering plutonium for 14 year old me.

BWAHAHA

[XSportSeeker]

"We discovered that some were able to use the demo to unlock the full game."

Nope. According to people who got full access to the game, they didn't have to do anything to unlock the game... it was already unlocked. They just kept playing it past the demo part.