Death Stranding PS5 free trial never stops counting down

Over the weekend, Sony rolled out new game trials to allow PS5 owners to try out specific games before actually committing to a purchase. That sounded good, but gamers quickly discovered a problem: Trials are for a limited time and the clock starts ticking the second you click download.

It’s not yet clear how extensive or long-term these new game trials will be, but Sony is currently offering them in the UK and Canada for both. Death Stranding: Director’s Cup and Sackboy: a great adventure. By email which was recently distributed to PS5 owners in these locations, the free game trials last six and five hours respectively and will be available until October 28.

Timed demos are nothing new. Sometimes, instead of creating a specific piece of game for players to try it out, developers just give access to the entire game for a limited time. However, these demos usually only count the time you actually spend playing them. This is not the case with these new Sony tests.

“Once you click on download, you will have a limited time to play the game whether you play it or not,” reads Sony’s email announcing them. In other words, Sony doesn’t hide this weird caveat, but it’s still counterintuitive enough to take a lot of gamers by surprise.

“Before going to bed, I started downloading the Sackboy: a great adventure trial so that my son and I could play the game in the morning, ”wrote Richard Breslin To GameByte. “When I woke up, I checked to see if the game was completely downloaded. Fortunately, it was. Unfortunately, we were unable to access the game.

It would be one (frankly still weird) thing if Sony started the countdown immediately after downloading the game completely. Starting it in the middle of it is even weirder. Death Stranding: Director’s Cup is 69 GB. A wired PS5 is always going to take a long time to download, and if you rely on Wi-Fi or live in a place with slower internet speeds, it can take hours.

Game demos was more common back in the days of the PS3 and Xbox 360, and although they have made a slight comeback in recent years, they are still far from the norm, replaced instead by weekend beta tests or rendered completely obsolete by services like Game Pass. Sony’s PS Now library is still far behind Microsoft’s best-selling service, so game trials are a smart way to fill that gap in the meantime, but maybe not with those kind of drastic limitations.