In response to today's gaming website shennanigans, Activision have just announced the following:

The recent reaction to the upcoming Call of Duty demo has caught us here at Activision by surprise. We're appreciative and excited about of the high level of enthusiasm the game has received throughout the gaming community. Due to the tremendous demand for the demo – we are answering the call by not only making the demo freely available to all gamers at the same time, but early – This Friday Night - just in time for the long weekend.

Great news for all. We'll obviously have a mirror up as soon as possible (though being a Saturday night release our time, there may be some delay that will certainly be unrelated to excessive partying, that's for sure).

We at AusGamers are firm believers in non-exclusive demos - they make life pretty hard for gamers who are busting to get a look at new titles. While GameSpy and FilePlanet do an excellent job, it is great to see that this dilemna has culminated in an outcome that will ultimately benefit gamers most of all.

Wow, I think we're the first people to post this.

Of course, if you have unswerving confidence in fairly clever companies like Activision to do the right thing, this is sort of unexpected (at least imho). Caryn Law (who sent the announcement) is a great friend of all websites and always seems to do the right thing.

PS, Call of Duty looks awesome; I had the chance to check it out earlier this week.

Good news.

Also, good stuff Ausgamers for originally boycotting the demo and thusly helping to make the demo available for everyone at the same time.

We weren't boycotting the demo - it was exclusive to GameSpy/FilePlanet, so we would be (legally - although how the legalities of such exclusivities work I do not know) unable to mirror it.

Hi Stu!

Call of Duty looks pretty awesome, It's a shame about the fileplanet deal, I remember the days when it was FREE, gah just fire up a p2p program and download it of that.

Props to Activision for ditching their exclusive plans for the gamers.

I just watch the trailer for this over at the Activision site and wow!

I dont know what I hate more, your name or your hideously big sig.

Bam! Khel.

:P

thought it was only going to be exclusive for a certain period, and you weren't gonna host it even after the exclusivity had run out.

That's how I read it. That's what it said. Never mind now.