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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.
Err, easy to measure by whom, exactly? Certainly not us, the audience of these proclamations. Why, by the same token, my toilet-bowl-based Cold Fusion reactor produces easy to measure 2MW of electricity ... except it seems to stop working as soon as someone else than me or my employee researchers get into close proximity ... but because it is easy to measure you will just have trust me on that one!
Or perhaps they fucked up something and are now covering their butts by pointing fingers at their business partners and "pirates". There are other motivations possible here other then the one you are asked to sheepishly believe, you know...
The stupidity of this statement can only be demonstrated by a demand for you to disclose your "numbers" showing that my "numbers" of UFO spaceships infecting my dog's anus are wrong ... oh wait, that's right, you cannot ...
Bullshit! Those people would not have bought the game, if they could not get it otherwise. They would have simply copied something else, or bought something that they could afford or would be worth it for them.
The server issue is an issue of the delusional stupidity of living in a dream world. Would they have made the buyers have unique server accounts, this would not have happened.
Go back to your **AA people, FUDspreader!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
That's just a fucking stupid excuse.
Pretty much the whole thing. But you don't seem to get it, so never mind.
"With that attitude you might as well blame the woman who is raped for being too sexy. It isn't like game manufacturers lack free will, their actions are their responsibility."
You are mixing up the victims here. The company is the victim, not the people pirating. DRM is a means of protecting against piracy (IE: so the companies profits don't get raped).
DRM is a direct result of the vast increase in copyright infringement on the Internet. Eventually, companies will start moving everything on a server.. and there won't be any software to take.
Companies like turbotax and Adobe (they have a new online version of photoshop) are already testing out the waters with this concept.
I suppose you can always play open source games.
"No I'm not. Thetoadwarrior made that explicit claim, I addressed it and said it was bogus."
well, you are wrong again.
DRM wasn't just created because the companies wanted to control you. Why would they make things more difficult for the end-user with copy protection if they didn't have to?