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Roughly 88% of Peak Hour Demigod Users Pirates
by Chris Faylor, Apr 17, 2009 9:19am PDTUpdate: Stardock has asked the press to clarify that the below figures don't represent overall sales, but simply the breakdown of pirate-to-legitimate users at peak hours.
Original: While around 140K people tried to play Gas Powered Games' Demigod (PC) online Wednesday, only 12% or so were legitimate buyers, claims publisher Stardock.
"We ended up with 140,000 connected users, of which about 12% were actually legitimate customers," reads a status update from Stardock CEO Brad Wardell. An earlier message had put the percentage of pirated users at about 85%.
While pirates are unable to partake in multiplayer, the initial version of Demigod pinged a server for updates when the game started. That was changed in yesterday's patch.
"We spent a lot of time today trying to isolate out the warez users from the legitimate users," Wardell wrote, noting "it would require a lot of surgery to actually break them and even if we did, there'd be no friendly 'ha ha pirate' message which would result in people just saying the game is buggy."
Developed by Gas Powered Games, the RPG-RTS hybrid was officially released this past Monday. However, retailer GameStop began selling it late last week, causing issues as Stardock's matchmaking servers were not yet ready for so many players.
"Our stress tests had counted on having maybe 50,000 people playing at once at peak and that wouldn't be reached for a few weeks by which time we would have slowly seen things becoming problematic," explained Wardell.
As with past Stardock releases, the game shipped without any on-disc copy protection, as the company is strongly opposed to invasive DRM that hurts actual customers.
"It's not that we don't think piracy is massive," Wardell wrote in a forum post on Monday. "We just aren't convinced that it results in that many lost sales. Or more to the point, we don't think intrusive, obnoxious copy protection will result in more sales than we lose from people who don't want to mess with it."
"We aren't blaming piracy for the fact that the day 0 multiplayer experience absolutely sucked," he stressed in a later message. Stardock simply wasn't prepared for the influx.
"The roughly 120,000 users that weren't running legitimate copies of the game weren't online playing multiplayer or anything," Wardell explained.
"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."
Comments
For me, it has happened once and I know how stomach sickening it is. It feels like you, not just your talents and creativity are being taken advantage of, but you are, as a developer ..... and that can be the worst feeling in the world.
If these people who take these games, were to actually sit down, spend the hours and talent to make their own, just like the developers who get paid for it do, then have it stolen (yes, stolen), just like this game, they would really think twice before stealing another.
As they say, "It takes one to know one."
As for the game, it's 5 stars all the way around, offline and on. It IS worth the purchase.
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Pirated copies aren't lost sales, they're potential future sales.
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You look through this entire comments section and a solid half of it is just people trying to rationalize this rampant piracy with one ridiculous excuse after another like; "It isn't really stealing!" or "There was no demo released" or "The game is so crappy I'd never pay for it but I'll still play it because I'm an ass that way!".
And yet for all their posturing and boasting they ultimately fail to take into account one simple little thing that renders every pro-piracy stance irrelevant and greedy.
Games are a want, not a need. There is no plausible situation I can come up with where someone would 'need' to pirate a game. Ever. And so really every pro-piracy rant simply devolves into varying levels of greed and the excuses people make to rationalize their own greed and convince themselves and others they're decent people.
Bah!
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Demigod has no demo. It is insanely hyped, and rightly so, it's great! It has reviews that are already outdated and therefore misleading. The Gamespot review marks it down to 6.5 for an issue that was resolved three days ago. Not to mention the fact that most reviews nowadays are damn near worthless anyway. People aren't rich, some are scraping up barely enough to buy one game a year, and they need to see for themselves before making a purchase decision. Do these people not have the right to game? Do they not have the right to be an informed consumer? PC Games cannot be returned, so they need to be absolutely positive.
I am absolutely positive Demigod is awesome, and I purchased it. I won't be purchasing another game for several months, maybe even a year, but I'm sure that Demigod can keep my hobby rolling until then. It has so much replayability and ... well I won't get into an off topic rant on the quality of the game. Needless to say - it's great.
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Low and behold its on their web site --> http://www.demigodthegame.com/downloads
* You can buy it here for those that were looking for it like myself, at launch I was like WTF not on Steam and D2D where can I buy it? *
[Hint] All these companies complaining and bitching about piracy put out the god damn demo before you release the game and people will be more prone to buy your software. How else is someone suppose to try the game before they buy? Not all games a good.
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Assholes pirating this game: put your money where your mouth is.
Ugh. Really sad. :(
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But dont they use cd-keys to authorise access to the MP component? That just seems like a dumb move, cd-keys have always been a good way to make piracy of less benefit but they dont really harm consumers like the current wave of shitty drm does. You just need to make it harder for people to steal keys (either in-store or from users machines)
CD-Keys are also useful ways of getting rid of troublesome players, cheaters and the like.
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Why not just do that?
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I am loving what i am seeing though, just been burned too many times in the past buying on impulse.
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Game is about to be released on 14.05.2009 in germany.
You still have some time let to fix these mistakes.
And get some steam support.
btw DRM is not the way out of this.
Without DRM they crack it maybe in a hour, with DRM 2 hours?
It will get cracked and uploaded ANYWAY. So whats the deal with DRM.
I'm sorry to hear that 85% thing >_>
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my faith in gas powered games is dying . supcom was and still is incredible, but everything theyve made since has been boring retreads. space siege sucked balls, which is saying alot because i love action rpgs and hack n slashes. demigod is a game based on a warcraft 3 mod... for a guy who swings his name around so much, taylor doesnt seem to have any originality left.
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seems to be missing quite a lot of stuff imo.
EVERYTHING seems so limited. the gear, the upgrade options, ur moves... NO cinematic scenes either. :'(
the ending was pretty damn funny too. ALL i heard was my character smashing shit ( teh Ro0k ) and the narrarator announcing, "SMITE, DOMINATION, SCOURGE, DOUBLE SMITE, GODLIKE... GODLIKE... GOOODDDLIIIKKKEEEE !!!!! " then victory. i guess.
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Clarifications: :)
1. The 18,000 figure is the # of concurrent users at the peak. On the Steam stats page, for instance, you can see the peak concurrent users on titles that talk to Steam:
Quote:
Current Players Peak Today Game
81,543 90,824 Counter-Strike: Source
57,343 68,662 Counter-Strike
18,788 23,755 Football Manager 2009
14,577 15,606 Empire: Total War
14,394 16,430 Left 4 Dead
11,860 14,030 Team Fortress 2
So just above Empire Total War in terms of peak connections (game just launched so it's not a surprise).
#2
The infrastructure was designed to handle up to 50,000 of these connections.
But on day 0, there were around 140,000 concurrent users of which 18,000 are validated.
Pirated users can't get updates or play multiplayer but they 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.
The result was that in the first day, day and a half, users couldn't connect to each other (the connection servers would time out) and even the in game experience was horrible getting through menus and such because even a simple HTTP keep alive call (something as simple as a http call to check for the latest version to inform users if there's a new version) would cause the in game UI to hang.
The consequence is two-fold: First, early customers got a TERRRIBLE experience. Second, the reviews (notably Gamespot) based their review on this terrible experience.
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.
If there's any IT people here, they can probably better explain than I can what we've had to do essentially. It's not like we keep a room full of unused servers so the challenge of putting together a duplicate series of servers in 24 hours PLUS Stardock and GPG having to produce an update to the game to point to those servers was quite an undertaking.
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I think piracy's up from the olden days, because game file sizes haven't gone up much. Larger hard drives, faster DVD drives and broadband internet has.
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p.s. here's a better explanation http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?id=19699790#itemanchor_19699790
The update on the shack doesn't quite cover the gist of their message either.
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Also, I just wanted to say to anyone who uses DRM as an excuse to pirate games, that if you pirated this game, you are a hypocrite and have no right to complain about DRM.
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