Video Game Appetizers No Longer Served (but please enjoy our many entrees...)

It has been sometime since we've had them, but no longer are they served. The menu has changed. Akin to a magazine, or rereading the same chapter of a book over and over, demo discs were for gamers what cassette tapes were to people in the 80's, short, limited selections that you were likely going to repeat. Repeat and enjoy. So let's all take a moment to remember something that hasn't been with us for some time now, but we probably haven't missed...yet.
Especially if you were a young adolescent in the late 90's-early 2000's, you had no income, and therefore little likelihood of any new games, Demo Discs were a treasure trove of possibility and gameplay. And we've lost something, I think, now that these samplers are an artifact of gaming's past. We play our games differently, both what we play and how, and I wonder if we've made it harder for smaller studios to get their games noticed when in this last generation of consoles, even my collection, is marked by a dearth of 2nd and 3rd party developers and case after case is marked by the title of some mega-conglomerate's flagship series. Have we really lost that much?