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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.
There goes the argument that games are only pirated because companies insist on draconian DRM.
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.
+----------------- | What is the question!
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.
This is so typical.
The same thing happened to the game Titan Quest. I've never seen a game so stable and masterfully crafted before. The devs listened to the community and actually added features and tweaks to the game just for them.
Yet all the reviews I saw were negative. "Yet another Diablo II rehash", "plagued with crash problems - can't even get past the cave in the starting area". Well, it's a rehash in the way WoW is a rehash of EQ or UO, I suppose.
Unfortunately for them, the guy cracking their DRM failed and didn't care, so every torrented copy crashed 5 mins in. Also, he released it 1 month before TQ went on sale, giving time for thousands of people to download it (millions if it hadn't crashed 5 mins in :P )
Ever since I bought three games that wouldn't run because of DRM, I've been a bigger supporter of Piracy - but seeing my favourite companies go down because of it makes me less happy. :/
If one person who could crack the game had gotten it a week early, would DRM have helped prevent this?
One store sells early, and then there are a bunch of downloads.
One person breaks the DRM, and then there are a bunch of downloads.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
In this case does having a copy of the game entitle you to use the servers? Maybe they should charge for the service and use the revenue to expand their server farm.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
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.
Why, oh why is it that everyone is so gullible around here and just assumes that the data, as presented, has any relationship whatsoever to reality? Can any one of you verify this claim of hundreds of thousands of "pirates"?! Isn't the man telling you this a rather biased source, who has, based on his Stardock forums posts long since regretted not putting DRM in his stuff and has been increasingly draconian about the updates, activations, use of Impulse update software and what not? How is it that no one bothers to ask these questions before simply taking these dire proclamations at face value?
Do you guys start pulling your hair out and beating your chests in penitence every time some Sony or Warner announces that they "lost" 20 times the GDP of France to "piracy" last week?! Do you?
You can't play multiplayer without a valid one. Just like most other online games these days. The problem with Demigod is that it runs some other http requests (checking for updates, querying system info, etc.). This is why the launch was borked. Not because there are tons of players with pirated copies trying to play on legit servers, but because their servers were effectively getting DDoS'ed by a level of traffic that they were not expecting or ready to serve.
This situation reminds me of the 9/11 blood donation issue. For a few months after the attack, people were extremely willing to donate blood, more than the Red Cross even needed. But after the initial passionate feelings faded away, the Red Cross found itself having severe shortage issues once again. People claim that they only pirate because of DRM, and when a company like Stardock makes a big PR splash by releasing a DRM-free game they encounter a great deal of initial success. But once the feverish anti-DRM banter dies down people return to their ever inconsiderate, selfish, and pirating ways. IIRC, when Bethesda released Oblivion, over 1/3 of the people who called customer support for help had pirated the game and thus had no registration to account for. People are greedy. Not just the rich, but the poor, the middle-class, the sick, the paraplegic, they're *all* opportunistically greedy. Life in a nutshell folks.
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.
From arstechnica: Correction: Stardock contacted us to say that the 18,000 number referred to concurrent users, not sales. We have corrected the sentence accordingly. Brad Wardell also released some new information that clarifies the issue. On Day 0 there were around 140,000 concurrent users, with 18,000 validated users. The pirates couldn't update their game or play online, but they could still "touch the servers." "So over the first 24 hours, we had to essentially scrap together a doppleganger of the infrastructure dedicated to Demigod's multiplayer network needs, release an update to legitimate users to point them to it..." he wrote. "Now today, day 3, it's pretty much taken care of. Users are connecting in multiplayer, the servers are pretty responsive and we're adding more in preparation for the weekend."
How many "pirates" were foreigners who have no way to buy the game legally even if they wanted to?
No sig today...
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".
While I'm somewhat disappointed by the staggering number of pirated copies vs. legit copies of Demigod, I'm not at all surprised. I fully support their stance on DRM and while I do admit to pirating some video games, I went out and bought Sins of the Solar Empire. It's a terrific game.
Now, I have a friend who I was trying to coax into buying Sins. He didn't have the money at the time, so he downloaded the full game. We were able to play online together with no problems. Did he eventually buy the game? No. Why not? Like the rampant movie and music piracy that we see online, I think the answer is simple:
People, in general, have no moral issues with not paying for something that is readily available for free. After all, if you've already received the full product and "gotten away with it", why should you pay for it?
Now, Stardock has smartened up regarding Sins. You can no longer receive updates and play on the legit servers unless you register a legit CD key. In this way, most online games are safer from piracy in that they require a valid cd-key to play on legitimate multiplayer servers.
But here's my question to developers... whatever happened to releasing a partial shareware demo of your games before retail release? This is the business model that seems to have worked so way back in the day and got me to buy games like Doom, Quake, and the like. When did it become so important to get the game out the door that a game demo became a crippled, afterthought that might be released several months after launch?
Game developers really need to rethink their strategy on this one. Stardock has the right idea and should be applauded for their efforts to cater to the gaming community, but more can be done. Bring back shareware before release. Allow users to trying a full episode or 2 of your game, or maybe even grant temporary cd-keys to everyone at launch and let people play the full game for a few days and then lock them out. I want to buy your games. But show me that they are good and worth buying first.
Side note: I'm still goading said friend into buying the game so that we can play the new Entrenchment expansion online. We'll see how that goes.
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.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Actually this is quite common. Small, hungry companies start out with the promise to be "different" and "gamer friendly" etc, some get successful and more successful they get, more money the owners see filling their bank accounts, greedier they get. Soon after the Ferraris and the yachts get purchased, the greed becomes a burning, unquenchable desire that soon is overshadowing everything. Paranoia sets in that some "thieves" are looking to take it all away, the government "goon" tax-men, the undeserving uppity employees, the "pirates" etc and so on.
Stardock is just a latest example of this.
See above. Also, in this particular case, there are other possible motivations, such as a dispute with business partners over launch dates or a possible cover-up for a screwup with the multi-player servers that was discovered too late to fix before launch and Stardock was seeking excuses as to why they will not be operational and many other possibilities like simple incompetence ...
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.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
http://forums.demigodthegame.com/347467
Well, what a dramatic week it's been. The teams at Stardock and GPG have been burning the midnight oil this week.
As those of you who have the game can already see, the server issues are gone. We've recreated a duplicate of the server infrastructure we had but dedicated to users who have the most recent version of the game and a valid CD key (serial #).
Based on the logs, we are seeing lots of games being played on-line now. Yay. Average game has approximately 4.7 humans in it which is a good sign.
Some clarifications
I've seen a lot of news articles this week and a lot of confusion about what occurred this week. The issue isn't terribly complicated.
Ars Technica had a good article that describes what happened. But still, a lot of people seem to think warez users are able to play multiplayer games. No, they can't. Even the retail box has a serial # in it that users have to use and be validated to play online. What brought down servers was a lot more benign than that. It was the HTTPS requests to inform users if there was a new version along with checking the community features for info (friends lists, chat channels, etc.) and things like that. Things like that are pretty piddly. It's only when you get a ton of users doing that at the same time that it becomes a problem as we saw.
But here's the thing: While piracy is annoying, you can't blame piracy for this problem. Let's face it, there's plenty of data out there about how many pirated games are being played. We should have looked at that. We assumed since Sins of a Solar Empire and Galactic Civilizations, both of which sold extremely well and got great reviews, that the # of pirated copies of Demigod in use would probably be in the same ballpark, maybe twice as much. But had we looked at what other publishers have said, we would have known that it's not unusual for there to be hundreds of thousands of warez copies in use. And if we had, we could have simply had the retail version not have any HTTP calls in it and instead just had an update button on the main menu to check for updates and voila, problem solved.
The second misconception is the argument that because Demigod's retail version is heavily pirated that it costs massive sales. But that, again, puts the blame on the wrong parties. If you want to talk about the horrible multiplayer experience on launch day, well, that's our fault because of what I said above. If you want to say that the horrible day 1 multiplayer experience resulted in negative game reviews which will seriously damage the game's sales then I say again, that's our fault too because of what I said above OR we could have just sent out the review copies on release day (Tuesday) and reviewers wouldn't have had it until Thursday by which point the problem had largely been resolved and the review scores would have been fine. But in either case, it's still our fault.
So now what?
Now that the servers are working fine we're moving away from the "#$R@#@# Demigod sux!" posts and into the regular new game release issues.
So what issues are we seeing and working on? Here are a few at the top of our lists:
1. Players getting disconnected during games. Demigod's lag tolerance is fairly low resulting in disconnects if a player lags out a bit. This is fairly easy to fix. You get a player in Australia playing a user in Europe and there will be times when there's a hicup in their connection and POW, disconnect and it's extremely frustrating. I played all day today and it happened to me. This is a very high priority.
2. NAT negotiation. For users outside the United States in particular using DSL, this is a problem. This is a case where player A can't see player B and thus they can't play together. This is something we will be aggressively looking at next week. If we hadn't had the server overload, we likely would have this addressed already.
3. Panthe
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Copyright is an artificial construct designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many..
Let me fix that for you: Copyright is an artificial construct designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many on the short term, in a gambit to maximize the many's benefits in the long term. Of course, at this point in time short term means "life of author plus however many years", but that's a problem with the implementation, not the concept.
You can buy the game online via StarDock's Impulse system. Works just like Steam and accepts the same payment forms from what I know.
Yes it does. That's how the English language has evolved. You may have a point about French, where the language is governed by L'Académie franÃaise (Slashdot will no doubt mangle those accents), but English has no such guiding authority. English is governed entirely by how it is used. The only case you may have against a particular use is if it harms comprehension, for example the recent American use of 'I could care less' instead of the more accepted 'I couldn't care less.' In the case of a term that has been used for three hundred years, and which is unlikely to cause any confusion, the only people who complain are those who dislike English for the exact reason that has made it so popular; its ability to evolve and adopt neologisms.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Yes. Prove to me that, of those 100k pirated copies, enough people would actually have purchased the game to make it worth the cost and frustration of the DRM itself. Every pirated copy is NOT a lost sale...it applies to the *AA, and it applies here.
This just proves they made a game a lot of people wanted to play, and a lot of those people are cheapskates.
Just because the wrong word has been used wrong for a long time doesn't make it right.
Uh, that's *exactly* what makes it right. I am old enough to remember when "hacker" used to mean "computer enthusiast," and did not have any pejorative connotations. I am even so old as to remember when "hacker" meant "a bad golfer," before the word was co-opted by computer use entirely.
Seriously, "Piracy" now equals "Copyright Infringement." Stop fighting it, you're embarrassing the rest of us.
Like it or not, media influences language, and it's completely legit. If you want a fascinating and telling lesson in the process, look up the history of the word "geek."
Although these were exceptional circumstances, if we imagine that the ratios they experienced were true 18000/118000 is about 15% are payers... If they reduced the price to 15% of $40 = $6 ...Would that ratio change by much?
Would more people buy the game overall?
It's not exactly difficult to have a serial number inside each copy of the game, and register that to the user account. It's even possible to build that mechanism in a way that allows resales.
But it is difficult to keep your authentication server from getting slashdotted by copyright infringers' repeated failures to authenticate.
An argument mainly put forth by people who don't know how to use It.
The important point that SmallFurryCreature makes is that language is political, and has often been used as tool of tyrants. Notice the use of the language of the American Right: "The Patriot Act" for a set of laws that run counter to the Constitution. "Right to Life" for people who would deny the rights of women. "Defense of Marriage Act" which would deny the rights of a significant portion of the population to marry.
Calling someone who downloads a copy of Skip Spence's Oar from 1969 using a TPB torrent a "pirate" at a time when there are real pirates doing violence and holding human hostages is purely propaganda and a misuse of La Lingua. It was thus in Daniel Defoe's day and it is thus today. If the RIAA wants to use the term "pirate" that's fine, because they are engaged in a propaganda campaign. We don't have to accept their usage however, and we certainly don't have to adopt it.
BTW, there may also be examples of the American Left using English in a way that bends meaning, but since I'm one of them, I'm not going to go out of my way to cite examples, although George Bush was Hitler.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Didn't work out that way, though, did it?
Doesn't change that it was designed to benefit the few, in the short term, to encourage them to produce their hard to create but easily copied goods, in order to benefit the masses in the long run.
It's why I personally call for reforming copyright, not eliminating it. Eliminating copyright completely would do just as much damage, personally I think it'd do more damage, than what the current system is doing.
Like it or not, but piracy is creating a pushback effect on the current system. It effectively puts a limit on copyright for everything.
I don't read AC A human right
We're working on it. See recent releases about "Goo" and our second-hand game market. It's just not easy to do it in a way that satisfies all the stakeholders (gamers, us, the developers), and on a technical level (how do you stop someone playing a game that they have installed?).