This Wednesday marked the first full and official day that Demigod, the latest from Gas Powered Games and Stardock, was available to be played online. During the peak rush hour of gaming, over 140,000 players were online either enjoying some multiplayer action or playing by themselves. Unfortunately, Stardock issued a statement saying that of those 140,000 players, over 88% of them were pirates.
Hopefully those pirates will realize that they're missing out on a huge portion of the game and will finally decide to plunk down the $40 (USD) for the regular edition, or even the $50 for the collector's edition. Both editions can be purchased online through Stardock's Impulse Driven storefront.
But what happened was that we ended up with 140,000 connected users, of which about 12% were actually legitimate customers. Now, the roughly 120,000 users that weren’t running legitimate copies of the game weren’t online playing multiplayer or anything. The issue with those users was as benign as a handful of HTTP calls that did things like check for updates and general server keep alive. Pretty trivial on its own until you have 120,000 of them. Then you have what amounts to a DDOS attack on yourself.
So the day 2 update we released basically made sure legitimate customers were no longer being affected by those users. As a side note, no we can’t just eliminate the infrastructure being used up by warez users because they’re running the unprotected retail version and we can’t make a distinction between retail and pirated since there’s no copy protection. It’s not a huge deal in the long run (except to our metacritic score), it was just an unexpected challenge that made day 1 a very bad multiplayer experience.
Keep in mind that Demigod features no DRM measures and a high amount of piracy was expected. It's also an important fact to note here that these figures are only applicable for the peak rush hour of gaming.So the day 2 update we released basically made sure legitimate customers were no longer being affected by those users. As a side note, no we can’t just eliminate the infrastructure being used up by warez users because they’re running the unprotected retail version and we can’t make a distinction between retail and pirated since there’s no copy protection. It’s not a huge deal in the long run (except to our metacritic score), it was just an unexpected challenge that made day 1 a very bad multiplayer experience.
Hopefully those pirates will realize that they're missing out on a huge portion of the game and will finally decide to plunk down the $40 (USD) for the regular edition, or even the $50 for the collector's edition. Both editions can be purchased online through Stardock's Impulse Driven storefront.
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