So the footage of our E3 Halo Wars demo is officially out now:  http://www.halowars.com/ and also I believe on Xbox Live Marketplace soon if not already.  Check it out, I'm very excited by how this game is turning out and I think it will really "crack the code" of introducing all that is good about Ensemble's style of RTS gaming to a much wider new audience.

In general I'm finding that the ability to download demos is really transforming how word of mouth can build.  Sure, they've been in the PC space before but something about the ease of integration, coupled with the much faster spread of word of mouth in the internet age, really has the demo taking center stage.  Would games like Dead Rising, Crackdown, and Bioshock have anywhere near the kind of success they had without their demos?  I don't think so -- none really had big marketing pushes and all had demos that were very effective in communicating the quality of the experience.

This is an incredibly good trend, IMO.  It is one step closer to the hypothetic utopia where a game's commercial success is more a function of the game itself and less a function of the marketing surrounding it.  Right now that is largely the reverse, and I see that changing.  That's not to say marketing is evil or the like, quite the reverse -- it is absolutely essential.  I'd just like to see the games themselves become a bigger piece of marketing, and letting the games with a really strong voice get that out through all the noise.