Major Nelson has put up a post
reminding Xbox Live owners that Silver members will now have to wait a week after a demo debuts to download and play it. While a full week seems a bit harsh it is a nice benefit to being a gold member. This isn't exactly a new policy (just never enforced all that much) but I'm sure there will be people who will get their panties up in a bunch about it. Hopefully this will help prevent the service from slowing down every time a major new demo launches. The service crawled to a stand still the day the
Bioshock demo was released and spreading out the release of availability might help solve that problem.
I'm not sure that paying $50 a year is worth to get demos early and I wonder what publishers are going to think about having a staggered release schedule for demos. Most publishers time the demos with the release of the game and now they are going to have to factor in that delay into their plans. A lot of demos are also released on the PlayStation Network at the same time. It will be interesting to see how this pans out but I think we might see Microsoft back track on this in the future or have special sponsored demos that are released at the same time.
