Demigod started life on the wrong foot. The game's street date was broken, the pirates had their way with it, and the multiplayer experience was broken for way too long after launch. None of this seems to have phased gamers, however, as the game took the #3 slot in the best-selling PC games for the week. Even better? That doesn't even count digital sales, which Stardock CEO Brad Wardell claims make up the majority of the game's sales.

"But but what about those hundreds of thousands of pirates?" Wardell asked in the official forum. "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," he continues. "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."

Be sure to read the entire post, it's really something else. It's refreshing to see such openness about the experience of launching the game, the reasons for the troubles multiplayer has seen, and now the sales that seem to validate the game's DRM-less approach.

"When the focus of energy is put on customers rather than fighting pirates, you end up with more sales," Wardell wrote. "It seems common sense to me but then again, I’m just an engineer."