Over the past few weeks there have been reports surfacing, that Konami are considering deleting the Silent Hills demo from PS4’s. This report came after the new horror game concept was scrapped, due to Hideo Kojima parting ways with Konami.
Read on to find out why our Silent Hill PT demos should be safe…for now
These recent reports beg two questions. 1) Would Konami attempt to delete the Silent Hills demo? 2) Could Konami actually get away with doing this?
The latter is very tricky, because this delves into the realm of digital ownership. On one hand, it’s your PS4 and whatever demo you decide to download, you should be able to keep it without fear of any publisher accessing your console to delete files (updating is one thing, deleting is something entirely different).
On the other hand, we have the same digital fiasco that’s moved some PC gamers from Steam, to GOG. Yup, it’s that classic ‘you buy a license to play a digital game but you do not own it’ legal yawn. Add to this the fact demos are free, and this could well give Konami full rights to completely delete the Silent Hills PT (playable teaser) demo without individual player consent.
The Silent Hills PT demo has created a lot of hype. They may have had to pull it from PSN for legal issues, but do really think they’d delete the hype from your PS4?
However, regardless of what rights Konami could have to edit your PS4 hard drive, the main question is ‘would’ they delete the Silent Hills demo? Take into account the popularity of the Silent Hill IP, the PT demo and all the hype it has generated thus far, and that question pretty much answers itself.
Our money would be on Konami keeping that demo on your machine, purely for hype. Yes, you may read more speculation into ‘deletion’ but this is purely to chuck more coal into the hype train. Do you really think Konami would let the Silent Hill IP fade to black? Do you really think they’ll delete what has quite possibly become their most effective promotional tool to date?
Unless a new Silent Hill game is announced this year (forcing an update or a completely new demo), we can quite confidently say that your Silent Hills PT demo should be perfectly safe where it is.
