How Piracy Affected the Launch of Demigod

Demigod is an RTS/RPG hybrid developed by Gas Powered Games and published by Stardock, a company notable for their progressive and lenient stance on DRM. The game was set to be released on April 14th, and shipped without any form of copy protection. Unfortunately, retailer Gamestop broke the street date and released it earlier in the week. A day after pointing this out, Gas Powered Games posted some numbers about the players hitting their servers. Roughly 18,000 connections were made from legitimately purchased copies; over 100,000 were made from pirated copies. Meanwhile, the servers, which were not yet ready for that level of traffic, buckled under the strain, resulting in poor experiences for people trying to participate in multiplayer. While some reviews were positive, others criticized the game for the connectivity issues. After another day, they were able to stabilize the servers to the point they'd planned on for the original launch.

Comments

So much for pirate ethics

[Norsefire]

There goes the argument that games are only pirated because companies insist on draconian DRM.

Re:So much for pirate ethics

[the_one(2)]

Yes but maybe the argument that people who do it mainly do it because they want to try before they buy still hold.

PS. I'm not saying that I believe it. It will be interesting to see the stats in a month or so.

Re:So much for pirate ethics

[rolfwind]

Yes but maybe the argument that people who do it mainly do it because they want to try before they buy still hold.

PS. I'm not saying that I believe it. It will be interesting to see the stats in a month or so.

Use occam's razor and go with the simplest explanation: People pirate because they want free shit and it's easier in some cases than going to the store.

If you've ever seen the breakdown of law & order (Iraq right after invasion, New Orleans after Hurrican Katrina, LA after the riots, false Craiglist ads), you should know a lot of people are freeloading scavengers as soon as they don't think their actions have any consequences.

Do you think the internet, especially, which promotes the feeling of such an environment is immune from that? I don't think the explanation is complex at all.

Re:So much for pirate ethics

[Computershack]

Yes but maybe the argument that people who do it mainly do it because they want to try before they buy still hold.

Bullshit. If they've got a copy which seemingly works 100%, most of them won't bother buying it because whats the point? In a month or so, the stats will be even worse. Guaranteed. So already IN ONE SINGLE WEEK, Gas Powered Games and Stardock have lost 80% of the potential revenue of the game and had its reputation tarnished by the freeloaders because of the server load issue.

Re:So much for pirate ethics

[brit74]

I don't think anyone has really argued that.
Yes they have.

The main argument "in favour" is that piracy doesn't affect sales - most of those who download the game wouldn't have bought it in the first place.
That's not an argument "in favor" of piracy. Example: A company has zero piracy and 100,000 sales. Along comes piracy. Now, they have 1,000,000 pirates and 10,000 sales. In the second case, you can truthfully make the statement that "most of those who download the game wouldn't have bought it in the first place". In this imaginary example, 900,000 people wouldn't have bought it. But, another 90,000 people pirated it INSTEAD of buying it, causing sales to plumet 90%. Nobody's going to seriously accept the "most of those who download the game wouldn't have bought it" argument because even if it's true, it doesn't address what companies are REALLY concerned about: losing sales due to piracy. All "most of those who download the game wouldn't have bought it" really tells you is that each pirated copy wasn't a lost sale, rather, each pirated copy represents part of a sale - but that can still add-up to huge losses.

A community of 18,000 would amount to empty servers a lot of the time especially if the game is available globally.
Yeah, because 18,000 players means you'd never find anyone to play against. Anyway, the "enough players to play against" is the kind of argument a pirate might think is great (because it legitimizes their piracy), but no smart company is seriously going to accept that answer.

Only a very detailed statistical analysis of the numbers could tell you if it was a good or a bad thing, and even then people would still argue with the result.
In general, the people creating the media thinks it doesn't help. People who pirate like to pretend it does help.

I can make a pretty good guess at who's more biased between those two groups. The companies want to maximize their profit. This means if piracy helps them, they will want piracy. If piracy doesn't help them, they won't like piracy. So, companies benefit by following the facts wherever they lead. They have an interest in finding out the truth - whatever it is. And most companies agree: piracy harms them.

Pirates, on the other hand, benefit from piracy regardless of whether piracy hurts or harms companies. This puts them in a position where they should always claim (or convince themselves) that piracy helps companies - which makes them biased towards one single conclusion.

In the end, I don't buy that there are two sides to piracy claim.

Re:So much for pirate ethics

[thetoadwarrior]

The whole try before you buy thing is a load of shit. You won't buy a game you've completed for free and quite often it's teenagers using this excuse. Do they expect me to believe they can actually afford the ass load of music, movies and games they steal without a decent paying job if they even have a job?

I do know some people that have downloaded things and then bought them. It does happen but there is a huge amount of people that are just tight wads or think they deserve more entertainment than they can afford.

If we want to save the internet from DRM we have to find a way to get rid of this dead weight so they don't ruin it for the rest of us.

Re:So much for pirate ethics

[brit74]

Only in the bizarre world of copyright/software politics is it a problem that there was huge interest from people trying out your game!
That's what demos are for. Anyway, the problem is not that they are trying out your game. The problem is that people have the full product and no longer gain anything by paying for it.

Re:So much for pirate ethics

[VinylPusher]

Yes but maybe the argument that people who do it mainly do it because they want to try before they buy still hold.

Bullshit. If they've got a copy which seemingly works 100%, most of them won't bother buying it because whats the point? In a month or so, the stats will be even worse. Guaranteed. So already IN ONE SINGLE WEEK, Gas Powered Games and Stardock have lost 80% of the potential revenue of the game and had its reputation tarnished by the freeloaders because of the server load issue.

You assume those 80% of people would have purchased the game, had it been impossible for them to obtain a pirate copy.

I find this a difficult concept to accept. There are a whole bunch of digital media on my laptop and desktop that I would never have purchased, had free copies not been available.

I buy things that are good. If I pay e.g. £24.99 for something, it's because I want to reward people with their hard work. I guess a lot of non-pirates pay for many things which they later feel were not worth the money? I'm not happy to accept this.

Re:So much for pirate ethics

[Guspaz]

You, and everybody else, seems to be missing the point. The game wasn't OUT at the time. GameStop leaked it, pre-orders got activated, and the rest of the game buying public still couldn't buy it.

When a game is only really available to pirates, of COURSE there will be more pirates than paying customers.

Re:So much for pirate ethics

[damienl451]

Only a very detailed statistical analysis of the numbers could tell you if it was a good or a bad thing, and even then people would still argue with the result.

We should beware of physics envy. Do we really need pseudo-complex econometric studies that probably fail to control for many variables (most of which might not even be clearly identifiable in the first place)? I'm always amazed when people argue that a statistical analysis or econometric study is what we need, when all it takes is 5 minutes of rational thought.

• The demand curve for video games is downwards sloping
• Pirated video games are perfect substitutes for legit copies. The only exception would be games that derive most of their value from the multiplayer experience (e.g. UT, Quake III, etc.) AND have implemented an effective way to prevent pirated copies from accessing the multiplayer part of the game.
• If the cost of pirated video games (including the opportunity cost of the time spent finding ways to bypass DRM, etc.) is lower than cost of legit copies, it is rational NOT to buy a legit copy.
• The total cost of pirating video games is close to 0, since cracks are easy to find

Maybe not everyone will always act rationally. Maybe *some* people will say "I've been playing for 1-hour, I should buy a legit copy". But most people will behave rationally and not buy what they can get for free. The precise percentage of people who will still buy video games is unknown, but it is lower than if piracy did not exist (the availability of free perfect substitutes causes the demand curve to shift to the left).

I think the pro-piracy movement should learn more about economics. They seem to assume that people either would be willing to buy a game or would not. In the real world, people make decisions at the margin. Maybe you're not willing to pay $50 to play the game now but, in two years' time, when it costs $10, you'd be willing to buy it. Is it a lost sale or not? Perhaps not at current prices (thus, "I'd never have bought it anyway"), but a lost sale indeed at a lower price.

Re:So much for pirate ethics

[Draek]

I agree with your second and third paragraph, which is why I believe your first paragraph is just a steaming pile of trolling crap. Yes, there's plenty of idiots that download anything that tickles their fancy and even many that don't (but hey, it had lots of seeders so it'd be fast anyways) and they should be taught the idiocy of their ways, mostly because they're driving the costs of broadband up for the rest of us, but the fact remains that both the prices of games have stayed way up, and the availability of demos has continued its trend down.

Case in point, the game featured in TFA, looked cool, searched for the demo, nothing. Do you seriously expect me to shell $39.99 for something that I'm not sure I'll like? 'cause that money would pay for an awful lot of indie and even big-name games that do have demos available.

Don't be so quick in blaming the BitTorrent-addicted idiots for this one at least. Plenty of reasons to go to TPB with this one, even if I won't. And yes, I'm one of those that download from TPB and, if I like it, buy retail and *then* buy on Steam again if its cheap enough (or the game was just *that* good), replaying it each time, and if I don't like it, trash can it is.

Re:So much for pirate ethics

[Haeleth]

The vast majority of people who wanted to play this game had no alternative but to download it.

Or, you know, maybe they could have waited for the fucking release date?

This is the voice of America: "Me, me, me! Now, now, now!" Makes you proud, doesn't it?

Re:So much for pirate ethics

[jayhawk88]

Yeah it's a promotional tool for your friend to pirate it too. Doesn't exactly help the developer does it? Oh but you got something for nothing so it's all OK isn't it?

Idiot run server then.

[Carrot007]

And they could not have the server respond with a message built into the game.

This would not be DRM. Just sense.

1. Game asks server for connection.

2. Server responds. game not released, kindly piss off. (and this could not be interfered with since they server knows the time and then closes connection with failure message)

3. Customer goes back to doing something else for a week and returns when server is working and it mildly mad at retailer for selling game early.

Re:Idiot run server then.

[mwvdlee]

Even though gamestop were the evildoers here, some 18.000 customers DID buy a legal version of the game.
Most likely most of them didn't know it was sold before the official release date.
Would you, as the company selling this game, want to deny your customers access to the server because somebody else broke the rules?

Re:18K legitimate copies, 100K pirated...

[broken_chaos]

100K pirated because it was not legitimately available at the time to most people. You can't draw any other conclusions from this.

This is GameStop's fault for breaking the street date by such a large margin, and it's invalid as a measure of the effect of piracy.

+1 Star Trek!

[TaoPhoenix]

Forget ... the William Shatner jokes.

Star Trek nailed it right on the money here.

"Oh, we don't work directly for material things. The Replicators can make almost anything. So we live for other values".

So, we have a Replicator for Books/Music/Movies/Games/Software.

Give it 20 more years for the 3-D form printers.

IANAE (I am not an economist) but Trek portrayed a kind of Location Meritocracy. You worked to get good, and earned the right to be on the group that could make you better. (Enterprise). All the niceities became De Minimis Fringes.

Dr. Who aside, *physical premises* are not replicatable, so that became the new equation.

Re:+1 Star Trek!

[brit74]

Star Trek nailed it right on the money here.

"Oh, we don't work directly for material things. The Replicators can make almost anything. So we live for other values".

So, we have a Replicator for Books/Music/Movies/Games/Software.
The problem with that is the fact that you still have to design things. Design can be a major investment. The basic business model for (say) software is invest X dollars and sell Z copies for Y dollars in profit (each). Essentially, you'd splitting up your development costs into Z parts and having each customer pay for a single chunk. You'd better have X smaller than Y*Z, otherwise you just lost money. Of course, if everyone treats software like it's freely replicatable, the whole things falls apart because no one contributes to the development cost, the software won't get written (because it's too easy for people to rip-you off), and society is worse-off for the it's selfishness on an individual level.

Early releases

[Andtalath]

Actually, it's not that weird that people want to try a game at the earliest possible moment.
The problem here was that the game was leaked.

A leaked copy will naturally spread, people are interested in new games they can't get their hands on.

The sad part is that some will se this as proof that DRM is necessary, nevermind the fact that this would've happened even if they had DRM.

Re:Yes! And we should believe them because ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ugh, another one of these idiotic comments.

It's not a made up lost sales number. It's a server connection count. It's an absolute, easy to measure metric. You're REALLY going to sit here and say that Stardock isn't capable of counting connections to their own servers, or that they made up a bunch of connection numbers randomly, while spending the entire Easter Weekend working overtime to try and get things working due to Gamestop breaking the street date?

Why don't you show me your numbers showing how his numbers are wrong? Oh wait, thats right. You're just making shit up to fit your little preconceived world view.

Re:18K legitimate copies, 100K pirated...

[Delkster]

Well, if these guys really used to have a more lenient stance on DRM and have only moved towards stricter attitudes over time, you'd think there might be a reason for that.

The main reason why people wouldn't trust Sony or Warner making such a claim is that they tend to believe the motivation these companies have for pushing DRM isn't the piracy figures alone; they're also used as an excuse for schemes that give the big corps more control over the market and ways to milk the same product for more cash. The motivation was always there regardless of the piracy figures, and thus there's also more incentive to make the figures support those other motives.

If Stardock indeed used to have a lenient stance at least in the past, clearly they didn't have these motivations. If their opinion has changed, they've either picked up these ulterior motives over time (which, I suppose, is also a possibility), or they've actually come to believe that it's necessary due to the piracy figures. If they believe in that themselves and also state it as the reason in public, they would seem to have less incentive to forge the figures than the big corps who also have completely different reasons for wanting to yell "omg pirates!111".

Piracy? Bonus!

[Aladrin]

I read this from a developer's perspective and I see something different than most of you: Piracy helped them!

(I can hear the collective 'What!?', so you can save those replies.)

They were only prepared for dismal sales. They said the server initially ran 'less well' with 10s of thousands of people online at once. They sold 18,000 copies. All of those people will want to be online at once at the start, so they weren't even really prepared for the real sales they got.

Then they got 5x that amount because of the piracy. This let them see exactly where the system needed to be improved to handle the load.

They managed this improvement -in a single day-.

In my world, anything that can help me make that kind of improvement is a massive help.

And lastly, I'm a -very- avid gamer and I had never heard of this game. Now it's on Slashdot's front page. You cannot -buy- that kind of advertising.

Last note: Anyone that publishes an online game without a serial code is a fscking moron. Most crackers will not write a keygen for an online game specifically because it costs the developers money when they do so. They only write keygens for offline games.

And 1 more: Note that there are only 6,000 players on the rankings for the tournament. http://pantheon.demigodthegame.com/rankings/tournament/8/page/182 Are we really supposed to believe that only 6% of the people playing an online strategy game are interested in its first tournament? Or maybe that 100,000 was pulled out of their ass.

Re:Hypocrisy..

[Bert64]

The larger RIAA/MPAA groups would still be forcing out the smaller producers regardless of the level of piracy, infact if piracy were zero then they would be concentrating on killing the smaller producers as it would be the only way to increase their profits.

Copyright is an artificial construct designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many.. And the more draconian it gets the more people will fight against it.
Current rules are extremely detrimental to our culture, a work can remain copyrighted long enough that the original customers of the work are dead before the term expires, and for things like software that rapidly becomes obsolete the terms are just insane - many applications completely vanish long before their copyright terms would expire.
If copyright terms were more sensible, then the people standing up against them would be fewer in number and less credible in their message.

We pirate because we want shareware back.

[w0mprat]

Shareware games were how stuff like Wolfenstein/Doom and others pretty much built the PC game industry as we know it in the 90s. So I ask whatever happened to shareware? You'd download what was pretty much the full game without significant limitations (for example the shareware version would have only the first episode of several) and you paid a comparatively small fee to get the full version. If you didn't like the shareware game you were neither likely to pirate the full version nor end up with a regrettable purchasing decision. It was a great business model and it grew the market.

Re:So much for ethics

[PopeRatzo]

you can't blame piracy for this problem [this from Stardock!]...we could have simply had the retail version not have any HTTP calls in it... problem solved.

So, if Stardock doesn't think the problem was piracy, why are so many people here using this opportunity to bash people who tried warez versions of the game?

Re:Hypocrisy..

[PopeRatzo]

in a gambit to maximize the many's benefits in the long term.

Didn't work out that way, though, did it?

It got misused, mislabeled and mistaken for something that "helps creative people" when it really is just a way to accumulate wealth and power, and to create artificial scarcity.

When I see copyrights being enforced on stuff where all the creative people involved have been dead for decades, it kind of shows it to be the scam that it is.

Re:So much for ethics

[ThePhilips]

People who buy games feel being hurt by those who pirate games. What is obvious load of crap.

The actual PC game crisis was projected long time ago and number of PC market journalists have predicted that PC gaming is going to experience huge shake up. No, not because of piracy which was there since day one. But because of many many good games were already released are all are still playable. New games and ideas have to compete with huge existing catalog. Consoles have the problem to lesser extent, as they are refreshed after some time fixing bunch of technical issues, so there are more incentives for console gamers to buy new version of the same game compared to PC counterpart. Video consoles are still evolving, PC gaming is pretty much came to its plateau.

What the journalists called gamer for was to buy new games to essentially sponsor PC game developer to continue their work. Now enter DRM. As PC gaming came out of its dark BBS ages, it grew into huge business. Managerial decision to deploy DRM as a way to fend off piracy and maximize profits is only logical - from pov of manager. But it actually back-fired: gamers skipped many new DRMed games and reinstalled some 10yo classical games of the same genre.

What StarDock now tries to do is worth all support and praise we can give: they try to return PC gaming to its roots, when distance between gamers and developers was very very thin. The glorious times when publishers were actually doing what their name stands for: publishing, only publishing and no DRM non-sense.

After reading the StarDock comments, I actually want to go and buy Demigod off Impulse. Not to play - my PC barely meets recommended system requirements nor do I like GPG games - but probably as a way to support them both in their aspiration.