You can create scarcity by marrying the software with a physical object.
William Gibsons poem Agrippa [1] is easily accessible, though it was distributed as part of a program that'd overwrite the floppy it was distributed on.
But it was sold in various ridiculously expensive collectors editions.
While the point of Agrippa is ostensibly the poem, the mechanism of delivery was very important to the appeal of it as well as the media attention (of course the fact that Gibson was well known by then was important), and you could imagine something similar for a demo. Add a hardware element, and packaging that forms part of the whole.
William Gibsons poem Agrippa [1] is easily accessible, though it was distributed as part of a program that'd overwrite the floppy it was distributed on.
But it was sold in various ridiculously expensive collectors editions.
While the point of Agrippa is ostensibly the poem, the mechanism of delivery was very important to the appeal of it as well as the media attention (of course the fact that Gibson was well known by then was important), and you could imagine something similar for a demo. Add a hardware element, and packaging that forms part of the whole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippa_(A_Book_of_the_Dead)