Slashdot Mirror
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."
Way too many games out there come out not working well or not at all.
Yep, and how many of those games don't work well because of DRM? Possibly a lot. I HATE DRM (I am agreeing with you, by the way, I think).
Why? Do I pirate games? No. I have a whole shelf full of legally purchased games. Some of these games I can only install a set number of times (I am looking at Far Cry 2 as an example, I had to reinstall XP because I felt like but didn't remember I had to first "revoke" my FC2 activation... there goes one install straight away). Now, continuing with the example, I don't particularly like FC2 and I doubt I will want to reinstall it in 5 years. But, that is MY CHOICE to make. It shouldn't be the publishers choice.
DRM takes my (legal) choices away from me, and the publishers are using piracy as an excuse. Do I want to sell my copy of CoD World at War? Not at the moment, but I SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO. Thanks.
Maybe this is flamebait because Brad Wardell has been posting a lot of information about the networking problems they had, how they didn't found them during beta and what they are doing about it.
In the first week, there was an update at least once a day, and even now he's still keeping the players updated about how far along they are, answering questions on the forum and helping players with connection problems.