If you want to get a taste of Arkane Studios’ Prety without buying it, you can play a free demo of the game’s first hour — on console. The PC, however, didn’t get a demo, but Arkane President and Co-Creative Director Raphael Colantonio has a solution for PC gamers: buy the game and return it if you don’t like it.
Speaking with AUS Gamers, Colantonio explained that there’s nothing sinister behind his studio’s decision to deprive PC gamers of the Prey demo Arkane gave their console counterparts. Instead, it merely came down to limited resources, and Arkane believes Steam’s refund policy, which lets customers get refunds for any game they played for fewer than two hours, offsets the lack of a demo.
“It’s just a resource assignment thing. We couldn’t do a demo on both the console and on the PC, we had to choose,” said Colantonio. “And besides, PC has Steam. Steam players can just return the game [prior to playing] two hours, so it’s like a demo already.”
Of course, that process requires PC gamers to buy the game on Steam, pay full price, download and install the entire thing, keep track of their playtime, and then request a refund. It’s probably fair to call each of those only a minor inconvenience, but they still represent a series of requirements that console players wanting to try Prey before buying it don’t have to deal with.
In any case, Colantonio insisted that Arkane is a PC developer first and foremost, and that it has taken steps to ensure Prey doesn’t encounter massive problems on PC the way Arkane’s last game, Dishonored 2 did in November 2016. He attempted to clear up any confusion about the PC game being a port, saying that there is not port. “It’s a PC game. It’s a different engine to Dishonored as well. So we might have our own sets of problems, but we are of course very careful because of what happened with Dishonored 2. So we wanted to make sure the PC version of Prey is good.”
And while he wouldn’t go so far as to guarantee there would be no problems at all — the sheer number of hardware variations prevent that and bad timing with driver releases prevent that, he said — Colantonio said he’s “pretty confident right now” in the PC version. These statements are similar to others Colantonio made recently, in which he said Arkane had “doubled” its testing thoroughness after the Dishonored 2 fiasco.
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