In March, PS4 players will begin their year of exclusivity with one of 2020's most anticipated games, Final Fantasy 7 Remake. Now it seems they'll get to go hands-on with the game even earlier than that. According to a PSN store scrape by Gamestat, who recently delivered unto the world the early reveal of Resident Evil 3's remake, an FF7 demo is incoming.
Note that in the image below, there is no picture you're missing. It doesn't load on Gamestat either. Still, the title of the piece of content points directly to the existence of a demo.
Demos have fallen by the wayside over the last generation of video games. Whereas previous generations offered them by the dozens online or once upon a time they even came included with some magazine subscriptions, these days demos are rarer and rarer, partly due to their cost in both time and money in an industry where inflated budgets are already funding so many other aspects of major projects. Demos have also been shown to sometimes deflate game sales, so it's no wonder why publishers seem more averse to releasing them.
On the other hand, well crafted demos do seem to generate strong buzz, such as those recently released by Capcom for Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil 2 . It's hard to say precisely how much those demos impacted sales, but given that all the chatter surrounding them both was almost unanimously positive, it's reasonable to expect they were a benefit to the game.
We don't yet know when the Final Fantasy 7 demo will hit the PSN store but given that we are just three months out from the game's launch on March 3, 2020, it can't be far out now. Final Fantasy 7 Remake will remain a PS4 exclusive for one year before it later comes to other platforms, presumably as a cross-gen title by that point, as this time next year we'll be in a world with at least two new video game consoles in stores.
