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How Demigod's Networking Problems Were Fixed
The launch of Demigod was troubled by piracy and networking difficulties, which publisher Stardock worked quickly to correct. They've now released a documentary that gives a detailed look behind the scenes of diagnosing and fixing those problems. It includes meetings, interviews with the devs, and part of the bug-tracking process during a frenzied 108-hour work week.
Am I supposed to watch half an hour of videos before they tell me what they actually did?
Couldn't you just, you know, summarize it for us?
i've been there, i'm working 50 - 60 hour weeks and i achieve more now than i did in 90 hour weeks.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
When a game has problems and they don't publish details everyone bemoans that fact that they are so closed about it. "Just be up front and honest about it, we understand there can be problems..." everyone says. Then when some does that everyone starts crying out " Cheap bastards are just trying to get free advertising... ".
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
When a game has problems and they don't publish details everyone bemoans that fact that they are so closed about it. "Just be up front and honest about it, we understand there can be problems..." everyone says. Then when some does that everyone starts crying out " Cheap bastards are just trying to get free advertising... ".
Game developers often run into that problem and most (almost all?) of them have decided it's not worth being candid about their problems. It's interesting that Stardock have been able to twist their problems into publicity though, as over the five articles you'll find on Slashdot over the last couple of months about Demigod there are a lot of comments from people that've never heard of either before; you couldn't deny that these articles have given them a serious brand recognition boost, the only thing that's left to decide is whether it's been positive or negative.
I was serious when I questioned whether admitting your mistakes wins you additional sales, though. I'd be incredibly surprised if there weren't a measurable fraction of sympathy sales from the piracy problem, or sales generated by the networking fix articles. It would actually be interesting to see whether their candid discussion of Demigod has turned out to be brilliant marketing, whether intentional or not, and whether that publicity has resulted in higher sales than they initially predicted for the game or not.
They've covered the other stuff, it'd be interesting to see them detail what effect the publicity has had on their sales. Whether intentional or not it has been a massive free advertising campaign, with positive comments about the game popping up on the articles covering it. If they truly want to be open, why not discuss how that publicity has influenced their ability to turn Demigod around from what initially appeared to be a disaster?
Maybe if their problems were actually interesting, and not the side effect of them being idiots without a clue how networking works, people would be more interested. Everything I've seen seems to revolve around them digging up a method of connecting players from early rts games, used primarily on LAN environments, not actually testing anything with real world equipment. The problems they had are to be expected.