Sega Gives Away Yakuza 6 by Accident

PS4 owners got a treat earlier yesterday when Yakuza 6’s demo was made public, allowing people to sample the latest aggressively Japanese crime simulator before it’s official launch on April 17th. But it wasn’t like normal demos: it was a full 30 GB in size, with the expectation that if you didn’t like it, you could uninstall it, but if you did take a shying to it, when you bought the full version of the game, well, most of it would already be installed on your system, and you wouldn’t have to give up any progress you’ve made. It was a cool idea.

Until something went terribly wrong. Namely, it was discovered that for some lucky demo players, at the point where the demo was supposed to stop… it didn’t. They could keep playing, and in effect, they had been given a free copy of Yakuza 6 way before release, with everything, including trophies, enabled.

Sega, of course, quickly noticed this, and pulled the demo from the NA store—it was allowed to stay up in Europe and Australia, as apparently it wasn’t a problem in those regions.

It’s probably only a matter of time—a few days, if that—before Sega realizes what went wrong and re-releases a fixed version of the demo. The real question is, what they plan to do with the people who got a free copy of it by accident. Of course, Sega doesn’t owe these people anything – they would be well within their rights to remove the free game and demand that those players buy the full version like everyone else. That said, we don’t know how many people got this “free” version of the game, as it was reportedly only a small sample of people from one region. For the sake of good PR, it might be better for Sega to simply let them keep it… even if they decided to “lock them out” to help stop spoilers.

We’ll have to see, but honestly, I wouldn’t put money on the latter case. They are a business, after all.