They *can* spend a lot of man hours working around this, but the demand is low and and it's not going to increase sales enough to justify the taking development time away from their core make a money adaptation.
I think otherwise. Just like
poker sites offer play money games and
freerolls as hooks, the benefits of PTx or HEM or others could be promoted via support for play money. In fact they could do the trials on play money only! I doubt it will happen tho. I'm really thinking this would increase the pool of both real money players in general, and tracker customers in particular.
I too would rather work out how the database and HUD work without investing real money. For instance, I'm still looking for the best table skins to bring out the HUD, and how to alter the visual of the HUD. Granted, I'm still a low real money player, but that might change faster if I could refine my game with the database and HUD and how to use them both better for game improvements.
So for instance, I want to alter the looks of my HUD, adding subtracting, or colorizing it and that is my primary reason for a session. Its a shame I have to invest pennies even when the game at hand is merely a prop for the task at hand (changing the visual of the HUD).
Along the same complaint line, it's interesting the PT3 supports freerolls which are really just play money games with a twist. Makes me think that the option to offer play money support is easy (like it would take less than an hour to do on their end), and all one would really want to do is set up a separate play money database.