In the face of a decreasing availability of demos for games I feel that let's plays are the closest available thing to find out whether you like a game or not.

In the face of a decreasing availability of demos for games I feel that let's plays are the closest available thing to find out whether you like a game or not. A review can only go so far. The decreasing amount of demos for games is probably feeding into more people watching LPs or pirating the games. I know a few of my friends pirate games because they don't want to sink £30-40 pounds into a game only to find out they hate it. Even if you've owned previous games in a series you can't rely on that experience to determine whether you'll like the next game, as I've discovered with several games lately. Also, the author's assertion that watching the LP was a sufficient substitute for playing the game seems like it may not stand up against more choice based games like Mass Effect, at least for me. I could certainly see myself not watching any longer if the person playing started wildly diverging from how I'd react to situations. Even if someone is generally close to how I'd play there would be divergences in the choices.