Do you remember when you would purchase a gaming magazine, browse through the contents absorbing all of the relevant information affiliated with a fabled game you desperately covet, while merely feigning mild interest in other auxiliary news and contempt for the titles that received exulted praise they didn’t deserve. The covers smooth surface, veneered in a protective coating to defend from prolonged exposure, decorated with vague quotations of a games review and snippets of news with the title embroidered like lavish tapestry of elegance. Can you also recall discarding the elaborately constructed packaging and removing the sensitive disc that remained benign behind the useless paraphernalia enclosed, and cautiously removing the sensitive demo disc from the corrugated sleeve before sampling a demonstration of its unreleased contents. Though such conformities to physical publications and distributed demo’s haven’t been consummated just yet, the advent of internet has receded the need to expedite such an extrapolating monthly cost. Trailers are readily viewed on YouTube, breaking new developments are far more immediately accessible with social media allowing for significant immediacy, with developers capable of convening with consumers more directly, rather than just through editorial mediators. Independent blogs can be published and distributed without ambivalence amongst the social equality of other gamers, making the digitalized world a far diminutive, but convenient playground to convene.

“I’m sure Ground Zeroes will be impressive. But for £28, I would want snake to cook me a steak (Medium) and chips, clean the house and wipe my ass. Without arousing suspicion obviously. He is spy after all.”

The symmetry of gaming has, and always will alter as time and technology accord. But demo’s–whether physical or digital have always been a prudent way of affirming a games core facets, even through temporary means, for free. It was then your own inclination that what you had experienced was enough to persuade you to retain a product or if you simply weren’t fussed. Now it seems that we are expected to pay for this privilege. I am referring to Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, which acts as prologue to The Phantom Pain. What’s relevance is this I hear you retort disinterested? (I know that isn’t what you said but tolerate the hypothetical) Well your anointed one, Ground Zeroes is a condensed demonstration of The Phantom Pain, that will ultimately cost you 30! Yes OK, it is a separate commodity from PP, but let’s not persuade ourselves that it’s a completely separate entity altogether, but merely an entertaining demonstration of the fox engine and a publicised advertisement that consumers will be charged to play. Perhaps there is a tangible sense of yearning from gamers for something to do with their new bloated console, that developers believe that consumers will feel passively cajoled into obtaining a compact abiding, simply to stem the content latency from Sony and Microsoft.

For me however this is just an aberration of a growing discordance that is becoming a perpetual blot on out industry; charging gamers for additional content through discriminative exclusivity. For instance a general release of a standard game will cost X amount, but why settle for adequacy of the general, impoverished natives when–for superficial fiscal extrusion–you can obtain additional, extended content that has little impact on the narrative, with supplementary attire for your character that the general peasants could only dream about possessing?! Perhaps my pious surmise has become so agitated by the extrapolating cost that I miss the point of such extravagant accessories. Maybe there is significant differential between standard and special additions, or that there is a benign benefit to releasing an exposition of the PP potential aptitude. But I think I’ll prolong my abstinence for a company that values me as a customer, a fan or even a consumer. Not as currency.

……Hmm? I could be waiting a while couldn’t I?

Will you be buying the Ground Zero? Or is it a needless expense? Let me know. Cheers.