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How Piracy Affected the Launch of Demigod

Posted by Soulskill on from the might-need-more-than-three-bullets-this-time dept.

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.

3 of 613 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So much for pirate ethics by CarpetShark · · Score: 0, Redundant

    people pirating your game can increase the cost of running the servers for it considerably. That is a strong argument in favour of anti-piracy techniques such as DRM (assuming the DRM costs less than the cost of additional servers).

    Or yet another strong argument for encouraging third-party servers instead of legally PREVENTING others from doing so.

  2. Re:18K legitimate copies, 100K pirated... by Computershack · · Score: 1, Redundant

    So you're telling me that most of those 100,000 people will go out and buy it? I've got a bridge for sale if you're interested.....

    --
    I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
  3. Re:So much for pirate ethics by Narpak · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I pirated Demigod (before the official release date); played it single player for about three hours; on the fourteenth I bought the game through Stardocks Impulse service (like Steam).

    The game seem to be very nice, gotten some really funny games now to (though there are still issues that need to be rectified; though things are much better than they were just a few days ago). Also as I understand it they are working hard on completing a demo so people can try it out legally.

    --
    The Long Now Foundation