It may be a demo that leaked, but it's still illegal to spread it. Epic and Infogrames even go as far as mailing mods at some forums to halt any discussions regarding the leak. You may ask why, and whether they are over-reacting.
The answer is: no, they are not. Daniel Vogel summed it up nicely with "you only get one chance to make a first impression," and that's very true in the case of such a highly anticipated game as UT2003. It's not the fanboys that's the problem, it's not the hardcore UT players craving a sneak preview of things to come--most of them will buy the game regardless, no matter how "good" or "bad" a demo may look.
The "problem" is the large group of casual gamers and fans of competing games such as CS and Q3A. One glance at the demo, one forums post that's negative (and based on the "facts" of an old version), and the game might simply be dead for them. "doesn't look any better than Q3A, and the weapon balancing sucks, too." "lol, you just fell through the floor. and they took how long to make this run?" Such opinions, once made, will influence any future dealings with the game and may have a strong effect on the final decision whether or not to even bother trying out the OFFICIAL DEMO, mind purchasing UT2003. After all, "I already saw the demo three weeks ago, and it wasn't that great." Reasoning that content and engine build were probably outdated by a couple of months doesn't really help, because doubts about the product's quality are already there, however slight. And anybody with some brains and/or knowledge about marketing and PR knows that's one thing to avoid (or to play with
).
In short: any unofficial leak of this kind will hurt sales. It might hurt them little, it might hurt them much--but the damage is done.
ta,
.rb
