For You Are A Pirate!

The strange case of Stardock Games continues. The PC game maker's CEO, Brad Wardell, is paying the price for being terribly naive about copy protection, piracy, and gaming in this economy in general. The company's newest title, Demigod, has turned into a complete disaster only hours after its release earlier this week as the Ars Technica guys give us the post mortem.

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.

The sad part is I'm one of the people who bought the game legitimately, and I can tell you multiplayer connections are a disaster right now. They are slow, connections are dropped, and the game's not very much fun online. I'm a big fan of Stardock games and have a couple of their strategy game products (which did not have major piracy issues) that play fine. I highly recommend both Galactic Civilizations II and Sins of a Solar Empire, as a matter of fact. But those are niche strategy games, not the kind of big name multiplayer action releases that Demigod was. Pirates didn't really care about a geeky space empire building game like GalCiv 2 or an equally geeky real-time strategy title like Sins.

But Stardock really, really should have gone to better copy protection a while ago. While games like Spore have notoriously nasty copy protection that is in fact crackable, doing so is difficult. Demigod's lack of real protection made it so easy that, well, five times the number of pirates have the game at release than legitimate buyers. Demigod bears a striking resemblance to a hugely popular Warcraft 3 mod called Defense of the Ancients, and that alone should have set off major alarm bells in Stardock HQ. It's so popular in fact that I honestly believe for one reason or another, DotA players pirated the game just to play it. In fact, Stardock should have seen this coming and should have made copy protection a priority with Demigod. I could have told you that in this economy, gamers will turn to piracy rather than spend any amount on a game, especially the ones playing a free mod on a 7 year old game that still has a majorly active multiplayer community. The result is that multiplayer Demigod turned into a complete disaster.

"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.

And those reviews were just as bad for the same reasons (the game sits at 70 on Metacritic right now), which now means a lot fewer people will buy the game, and the fact of the matter is much like a movie, bad reviews and word of mouth can kill it in the first week.

Demigod may not come back from the dead on this one. And it's unfortunate. It's a fun game, and once Stardock takes action to expand the servers and stabilize connections, it should be a blast.

That is, if there's anyone left who actually will play the game. In an economy this bad, Demigod serves as a major warning to game makers. Protect your stuff. Piracy will only get worse as the economy continues to sink worldwide.

Remember the lesson of Demigod, folks. Be prepared.