Atlus says that it has essentially “run out of stock” of the demo for the PS3.
Anyone hoping to sneakily snag the demo for Atlus’ upcoming erotic thriller, Catherine, for the PS3 has missed his or her chance, as the Japan-only demo is no longer available on PSN.
The official Catherine Twitter feed announced that Atlus had only planned to allow a certain number of downloads of the demo. Once PS3 owners hit the pre-determined download limit, Atlus pulled the content. The demo is reportedly still available on Xbox Live, but as there are far fewer Xbox 360’s in Japan, it’s going to be a lot hard for the platform to hit a download limit – assuming that Atlus set it at a similar level to the PS3.
The decision to pull the demo seems like an odd one, especially when you consider that part of the reason it even existed was to answer some of the questions of confused Japanese gamers. It’s possible, however, that there’s no download limit at all, and it’s simply the case that the demo was proving too costly on the PS3.
Sony charges publishers a fee for every gigabyte of content that users download, and if the demo was proving popular, Atlus may have been faced with a bill it didn’t really want to pay. It doesn’t help that it’s a relatively simple matter for gamers outside of Japan to grab the demo, also adding to the fees. It’s also possible that both of these reasons are true, and that Atlus imposed a download limit because of the fees. This might also explain why the demo is still up on Xbox Live, as Microsoft covers bandwidth costs in other ways.
Catherine comes out in Japan for PS3 and Xbox 360 on February 17th. There’s no word of a Western release just yet, unfortunately, but hopefully it’s just a matter of time.
Source: Siliconera
