Stardock CEO Brad Wardell became a star in the world of PC gaming when he took a strong anti-DRM stance and decided the best course of action was simply to ignore the piracy. The pirates will do what they do, and the fans who were going to buy the games anyway will appreciate the lack of invasive programs. This easygoing, anti-DRM attitude also brings the added benefits of good press, good will, and all around good vibes. The problem, as he found out with the launch of Demigod, is that you can't always ignore the pirates; they can hurt you in very real ways.

"The system works pretty well if you have a few thousand people online at once. The system works less well if there are tens of thousands of people online at once," Wardell wrote on his blog, describing the launch of the game. Stardock had 120,000 connections to deal with, a number well outside its projections for online play. The system melted down, causing many customers to have issues connecting to online games.

The number of those connections that were legitimate? It's estimated to be around 18,000.

As the comments have pointed out, getting an early copy of the game was not tricky, as GameStop simply broke the street date. "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... So during the day today, people couldn’t even log on, and in some cases, the Demigod forums, which use one of the affected databases for some piddly thing were even down," he wrote. "Even getting the game running was a pain today because a simple HTTP call to see what the latest version would get hung leaving people looking at a black screen. Stuff of nightmares."

The team is working around the clock to fix the issues—Wardell points to having developers in Europe and the US as a good thing, and claimed he was just ending a 56-hour day—but the damage may have already been done.

When multiplayer goes, it takes the scores with it

"Before [Demigod] shipped, I wrote a scary email to our team saying how disastrous things would be and predicted doom for us and [Gas-Powered Games] if there were problems with multiplayer," Wardell wrote. "At the time, my worry was about things like disconnects and CVP. It didn’t occur to me that we’d have near MMO user connections to throw in."

The problem was that reviewers were trying to play the game, and they weren't liking what they saw as a major problem with online play. "Connecting to other players takes an inordinately long time, if it happens at all... Furthermore, the game client may hang should you try to exit while the game attempts to connect players, leading to an unhandled exception error dialogue (and a game reboot). Connection issues are widespread, which is a disastrous blow in a game that requires online play to be of much value," GameSpot wrote in its review of the game, giving it a 6.5 for a variety of reasons.

That score is going to be mixed in with the others in metacritic, and it will hold a ton of power for the length of the game's life, long after the connection issues have been fixed... if they aren't already. It seems like Stardock had a realistic plan for rollout of the online play, only to be slammed by overwhelming piracy, a problem it didn't plan for or expect. Now the company will be punished in the gaming press and gaming fora when players have issues connecting.

Wardell reacted to the GameSpot review on the blog. "First, I totally understand that connectivity is central to a game like this. I totally agree. But I think that should be weighted with what the average user who gets Demigod will experience and in reality, as annoying as this issue is, it’s not something that’s going to be an ongoing issue, it’s something that is likely to be taken care of in the next day or two," he wrote. "So this time next week, players will be happily playing but GameSpot’s review will live on." He wonders about the IGN and 1UP reviews, worried that they will dock points for the same issue.

Sadly, piracy simply can't be ignored anymore



"The reason why we don't put copy protection on our games isn't because we're nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don't like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don't count," Wardell said in March of last year. "When [Sins of a Solar Empire] popped up as the number-one best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue."

Now it seems as if he was being incredibly naive. Piracy all but crushed the infrastructure Stardock had given Demigod, hurt the perception of the online play for fans who bought the game the first day of release, and lead to at least one lower-scoring review than expected.

Are antipiracy measures the answer? Not likely. Any bit of DRM added to a game will be cracked, and will only annoy legitimate customers. What about selling through Steam? It's possible it could have curbed the piracy, but Stardock has its own digital distribution platform, and publishers shouldn't be forced to run to Valve in order to avoid the pirates. Switch focus to consoles, where piracy has a higher barrier of entry? Equally unappealing: Stardock titles are a natural fit for the PC, and require a mouse and keyboard to control well.

What's frustrating is that there doesn't seem to be any semi-workable solution, other than to spend time and money supporting a vast user-base that isn't willing to buy your product. While we can simply wring our hands with worry, this is Brad Wardell's livelihood. He doesn't have the luxury of saying there isn't a good solution; it's his job to find one... and he hasn't slept in two days.

Correction: Stardock contacted us to say that the 18,000 number referred to concurrent users, not sales. We have corrected the sentence accordingly. Brad Wardell also released some new information that clarifies the issue. On Day 0 there were around 140,000 concurrent users, with 18,000 validated users. The pirates couldn't update their game or play online, but they could 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..." he wrote. "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."