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Stardock Declares Victory Over Demigod Piracy
We recently got a look at some hard numbers related to the piracy of Demigod , a new game from Stardock and Gas Powered Games. Now, two weeks later, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell has essentially declared the game a success in spite of the piracy, and reaffirmed the company's stance that intrusive DRM is a bad thing. The game's sales figures seem to bear him out. Quoting:
"Yep. Demigod is heavily pirated. And make no mistake, piracy pisses me off. If you're playing a pirated copy right now, if you're one of those people on Hamachi or GameRanger playing a pirated copy and have been for more than a few days, then you should either buy it or accept that you're a thief and quit rationalizing it any other way. The reality that most PC game publishers ignore is that there are people who buy games and people who don't buy games. The focus of a business is to increase its sales. My job, as CEO of Stardock, is not to fight worldwide piracy no matter how much it aggravates me personally. My job is to maximize the sales of my product and service and I do that by focusing on the people who pay my salary — our customers."
...the horribly broken multiplayer in Demigod is an example of exactly why many people choose to pirate games rather than pay upwards of $90 (in Australia, equivalent in your local currency) for broken software.
Stardock CEO Brad Wardell was unavailable for comment, although analysts have noted that he could afford to spend less time preaching and more time supervising the production of functioning games.
(It's actually great to see this attitude, but game companies would be in a much more defensible position if they released fully functional software, rather than late-stage betas. I know many people pirate games simply to find out whether a game works properly on their machine or not.)
Read Pynchon.
fuck you caps filter.
The correct term is theft.
I supply a product. You use it or take it without compensating me. You're a thief. Steal an apple, steal an idea, steal a game. Thief, thief, thief. You're hungry, I don't deserve to it, you want to play it for free. Still a thief, thief thief.
Why do people have such a hard time accepting this? Are we so coddled that we can't look ourselves in the mirror after we do something "bad". I wish people would stop using all these defense mechanisms so they can pretend they are good people, and just openly say it: I'm a cheapskate thief.