As Jim alluded to in the comments thread for our Demigod discussion last week, one of the many interesting issues around writing for the web instead of for print is that a verdict passed on a game doesn’t have to stay static in the event that game’s problems improve/worsen. Demigod’s a fine example – if one of us had written it up on compressed tree-matter and shoved a number at the end, that number would reflect its enormous netcode screw-ups, and would sit as a faintly damning judgement upon it for all time (of course, damnable parasite-site Metacritic means that problem still exists for a lot of web stuff too).
While releasing a game that was problem-riddled in the first place is scarcely something that should be condoned, as GPG and Stardock (I’m becoming increasingly confused as to who’s really in charge of DG now) have been frantically racing to patch the thing up over the last week, such a judgement would already have been innacurate. Especially as it appears – oh dear – piracy may have significantly exacerbated DG’s multiplayer problems….
According to one of Stardock’s ongoing status reports about Demigod, “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. And if there are over 100,000 people, well, you get horrific results such as the game being incredibly unresponsive due to simple web service calls that were considered pretty benign during the beta that suddenly start to bring down firewalls and such due to the sheer massive number of calls that are being made. Sadly, most of the ~120,000 connections are not customers but via warez. About 18,000 are legitimate.”
A result, it seems of Gamestop breaking Demigod’s street date early, and the DRM-free game rapidly showing up on slew of Torrent sites. Do bear in mind that copies without a valid serial number can’t actually play online, but that doesn’t stop them trying, attempting to download patches or the game polling them. And that’s key – every copy of Demigod, legit or otherwise, phones home – apparently as an update check. If that check wasn’t in there, apparently, the servers wouldn’t have been struggling so. So while the amount of pirated copies is causing the multiplayer problems, those problems mightn’t exist if Stardock/GPG hadn’t put that check in. That is, of course, presuming you take Stardock at their word as to why Demigod’s multiplayer was so torturous at release.
In a follow-up status report, we got more details:
The issue boiled down to us having put together a multiplayer infrastructure that was designed to handle around 50,000 or so connected users. If the game took off, we would simply add more servers as the load increased.
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.
Another interesting element in the web vs print argy-bargy is that we now get this kind of transparency from developers/publishers – immediate word on exactly what’s happening with a troubled game, which can appease fans. Of course, the relies on the publisher/developer being prepared to be open and honest, rather than the cold, closed ranks and dismissive attitudes towards fans some outfits demonstrate.
Anyway, there’s King Fact – around 12% of Demigod’s first-week players were legitimate. As always, that doesn’t mean the other 88% are lost customers, but it’s forever startling to see these kind of numbers. More important, really, is the experience the genuine customers are having – have the couple of patches since launch fixed the multiplayer problems? What say you, faithful types? After a couple of days on the road I’ve not been able to stick my head in just yet, but hopefully it means Jim’s forthcoming full Wot I Think is finally all engines go…
While clearly piracy is the flashpoint to end all flashpoints on this site, do be grown-ups and human beings as you debate this in comments.
Oh, and if you want the more personal touch, here’s Stardock’s Brad Wardell recording a video diary for IGN wherein he looks into and explains the launch problems:
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@Larington: None of that is directly tied to piracy though. Less piracy does not automatically imply greater sales. It might just mean that fewer people play your game.
The point you’re overlooking is that piracy *in itself* does not cost anyone anything. Brad Wardell understands this. What matters is how many people *buy* your game. Those that don’t simply do not matter, whether they pirate it or not.
That’s not to say that *if* pirates can be converted to legal customers, it wouldn’t benefit the industry. But the same applies to people who just never tried the game *at all*. It would also benefit the industry if they bought the game. But they don’t.
I don’t condone piracy. Consider this playing the devils advocate if it helps deflect a flame war. ;)
But equating piracy directly with lack of profitability is just as presumptuous as the comment you were responding to.
The two are related, certainly, but the relationship is not that simple. Piracy can help sales as well. A lot of big IP’s are big *because* they were initially pirated. That’s how people heard of the game originally. They played it, and liked it, and a few years later, when the sequel comes out, they go “hey, I know that”, and buy it. iD Software owes much of their success to the fact that their early games were pirated. That gave them the recognition that ensured their later games would sell like hot cakes.
There are a lot of big games that we’d have never even heard of, if we hadn’t played a pirated copy when we were kids. Don’t underestimate that effect. When I was a kid, buying a lot of games just wasn’t an option. Instead, we played pirated games on my friend’s Amiga. That’s how I learned about Civilization, and today, I own all four games in the series. Because I liked it when I played the pirated copy. A lot of us are only gamers in the first place, because we were able to experience games before we could afford to buy them in any quantity.
I’m not saying piracy is a net positive for the industry, but it is not always a net negative either. It helps broaden your customer base, and in the long run it pulls in some customers. But yes, it it also means that you lose some customers.
I’m not in any way defending piracy (I know the anti-piracy brigade is going to completely ignore this statement, but I’ll try anyway), I’m simply pointing out that it’s not as simple as “piracy means fewer sales”.
Is it reasonable to compare the videogame landscape of 1999 to that of 2009? How many videogames in 1999 were made with $100 million budgets (GTAIV)? And was piracy as easy and widespread pre-bittorrent days?
Sales are high in the games industry, maybe, but profits certainly aren’t
Videogaming at large is indeed seeing record sales, which means people are buying games, not stealing them. If profits are down, despite record revenue, it means overhead is too high and/or the company’s being grossly mismanaged.
It demonstrates how fragile games development is. Thats the point I’m trying to make. We’re playing russian roulette with peoples livelihoods.
I don’t want to do anything that inconveniences our legitimate customers because even if I stop all piracy, I don’t agree that it would noticeably increase our sales.
You have to take a step back and say, “if you had stopped them from pirating it, would they have bought it?” The answer is probably no.
They’ll always be a percentage that would buy it, however small. In this case if 10% of those pirating the game had had no other option and instead bought it, DemiGod’s sales would have jumped by a third. I think that’s significant.
@Larington: I agree with that one. It’s striking how few games manage to make a profit, and whether or not piracy is the main culprit for that, it is a major problem for the industry. Game development as it is, is extremely fragile like you say. Studios are always going under, even in the best economic times. Not because the industry isn’t earning record revenues, but because most of that money goes to a few AAA games, the publishers, the retailers, the middlemen and numerous other money sinks.
But most likely, 10% is an unrealistically high figure. And there is always a choice. Games virtually always get cracked. The problem with DRM is that it only has to be cracked *once*, and then every pirate can play it. You are right, DRM would have a strong case *if it worked*. But it is unbelievably fragile. It is so ridiculously easy to copy binary data. Make one copy of a game, and it can be in the hands of every warez group within a matter of hours. And if just one of them is able to crack it, that crack can be in the hands of every would-be pirate within another hour or two.
That means it is essentially impossible to remove the option of pirating the game. It can always be done by those who want to.
I’m not saying piracy is a net positive for the industry, but it is not always a net negative either. It helps broaden your customer base, and in the long run it pulls in some customers. But yes, it it also means that you lose some customers.
The exact same thing can be said of used games sales.
I have a feeling that all gaming will eventually be subscription/account-based to eliminate piracy and the second-hand market, both of which deprive publishers of money.
@Rich_P: Yes, it can. And some developers have made that exact point too. (Soren Johnson made a big post about it on his blog, going against all the big publishers who want used games sales eliminated)
That seems to me to be one of the major problems with the games industry. It is run on a model that is entirely obsessed with short-term revenue. It is cannibalizing its long-term profits in order to maximize revenue *today*. I’m not saying that they should simply allow piracy and encourage people to trade games, but they should consider the positive effects of these things, and examine how it can be exploited. They need to think in number of copies played in addition to number of copies sold. They need to recognize that 10 sales and 100 people playing the game is better than 10 sales and 10 people playing the game.
Indeed. But the problem is that everyone and their mother-in-law seems to think that you need to make a zillion dollar MMO in order to have a successful subscription based game. Thats silly. And the reason why so many MMO’s fail. Some spectacularly.
Yes, Larington, how many indeed.
How many shitty games would have sold well because – if there is one at all – demos often are prettied-up, crappy-parts-omitting propaganda, many games are pure shit once you manage to look past all the hype and blatant lies – and YOU CAN’T EVEN RETURN THEM. Even WITH all the DRM shit these days you can’t. How’s that for logic? Shouldn’t draconian DRM guarantee that games should be treated as any other product and be returnable if it turns out you don’t like it?
While there are a few developers that really shouldn’t have gone under out of the probably only a couple that have done so directly related to piracy, they’re the exception and not the rule. I really can’t bring myself to mourn for people releasing crap at the same price as quality games while feeding them essentially welfare money hoping for the remote possibility that they somehow manage to make something worthwhile some time in the far future.
The point here is that piracy makes software (probably even the only, I guess) a product that can be judged comfortably and is (quasi-)instantly-delivered in its entirety at no cost to either party before one decides to pay for it. Think about if that were possible for every other kind of product. You’d press a button, and you’d have EVERY model of, say, new plasma TV assembled and connected in your living room. Do you really think any kind of even slightly inferior (value for money) product would survive? That is how I see piracy: as a kind of harsh, abstract evolutionary mechanism.
But I’m thinking out my ass, here (probably obviously, too), because I only have anecdotal evidence of me and my friends/acquaintances pirating stuff for well over 10 years WHILE ALSO BUYING THE STUFF WE HONESTLY LIKED.
I’d really be surprised if even 5% of all the pirates ended up buying the stuff they pirate, anyway – most just do it because they can and it’s easy and to satisfy some weird primal hunter/gatherer urge I never understood – at least those that I know do.
But maybe I’m wrong and there’s this huge blob of faceless, evil, filthy rich pirates bathing in their open-air whirlpools filled with ducats located in some tropic paradise featuring white beaches, emerald sea and coconut palms while sipping martinis and smoking cigars, permanently downloading the complete usenet and silently sniggering to themselves about cheating some poor sod out of, for them, a cheap tip’s amount of money. Frankly I’ll never know.
@jalf: Soren’s blog is pretty insightful. His defense of used games is one of my favorite posts though
They need to recognize that 10 sales and 100 people playing the game is better than 10 sales and 10 people playing the game.
The Introversion guys brilliantly took advantages of piracy for their release of DEFCON. From Jim’s interview with them:
We figured that genuine players would still have a better time if they were playing against pirates, than playing against nobody. So we produced a pirate version of the game and released it into the world.
we put the full game out with a specific authentication key, so we could track the use of it. It was all switched on and you could play the pirated game with that key, but at any time we could flip the switch and turn that version of the game off, with a message saying that you needed to pay for the game. That brought in new purchases. The idea … is to accept that there’s going to be a pirate version on day one and take advantage of that.
“It is a well-known fact that a very small proportion of games published become successful in the marketplace. In 1999, fewer than 3% of PC Games available on the market, and about 12% of console titles, sold more than 100,000 copies – a figure that is itself often far below the breakeven point [Laramée00].”
Does that comment take into account the quality of the 97% of games that apparently failed to break even? Did it take into account the amount which actually found shelf space? The amount that was actually advertised in a fashion other than relying on word of mouth and arcane rituals? Did it even take into account over saturation of the market? There are simply far too many games made and most are of lackluster quality.
Or did that comment actually specifically indicate piracy as the sole cause of that huge failure rate? And if so, how on Earth did that actually arrive at that conclusion?
Sure piracy is a problem, but we have no real facts to state how much of a problem. All we have are publishers who like to use it as an excuse for poor sales when perhaps they should actually be examining the quality of their product.
We have those that look at the number of seeds/leechers and then jump to conclusions about the amount of piracy, without taking into account what happens thereafter. What is the actual percentage of people who pirated a game that then went out and paid for it?
Sure we hear of extremely low figures for such conversion rates, but then all we’re hearing are figures put out by an entity that has an invested interest in making piracy look as bad as possible.
The we have the DRM companies who also, for their own interests and livelihood, need to make piracy sound as bad as possible lest they no longer manage to sell their product.
So once again, I call for a completely unbiased, independent research into the TRUE affects of piracy in the gaming industry. Then perhaps we’ll get a much fuller picture that isn’t solely tainted by the views of the publishers or pirates who will twist any figures to their advantage.
@bansama: Well said.
wait, wait , wait, you with the DRM and pirates things you guys are getting away from the point here.
Let me get this straight, GPG releases a game that allows playing single play without a crack (not that it matters since it would have been cracked eventually), then the games sneakily CALLS HOME, it doesn’t ask if you want to update it, it doesn’t ask if you want to do a “general server keep alive”, it just does it, and the servers go down…
Apparently a script kiddie wrote the net code so that GPG actually ends up DDOSing themselves, 120k ppl trying to connect once, just once did that ? come on, the game would have to try several times per second to actually DDOS those servers, do they really expect me to believe the 120k just finished their download and started the game all at the same time ? or that a few thousand/hundred requests at the same time from the few ppl that would statistically start the game at the same time kill a server ?, wth are they smoking ?…
Why does the game find it so important to call home ? why not asking us ?
is it really the pirates fault ? they were not even trying to connect intentionally, its the stupid Trojan-like call home feature that did it. Have you tried any demos lately ? i have, just like the full games, they ALL try to call home, if they had released a demo and all those supposed pirates would have tried the demo version instead, which would very likely include the call home feature, they would have crashed the servers ANYWAY.
and just one thing about DRM and this call home crap, who gets to say what rights are mine and which aren’t ? who gets to say which information you are sending with those hidden call home features is “harmless information” (like they always call it) ?, You know who they are, the freaking devs and publishers, we get nothing to say about it, we just get to squat, lube our holes and take it.
@Kevlar: Just a thought but maybe he’s talking like he’s a ration human being because he is a rational human being? He certainly seems to have come up with a pretty decent argument for his position that valid or not certainly requires a reply from those who wish to criticise him and can’t be dismissed out of hand as you have done.
I wonder how you would reply in detail if forced? What is the basis of your condemnation? I’d really love to hear an exposition of your moral philosophy and how it relates to copyright infringement rather than just rhetoric.
It seems to me that in these discussions of copyright infringement that there are a few different basic moral philosophies at play and lack of recognition of this causes people to talk past each other an inordinate amount.
There seems to be a set of people who equate morality with legality. Personally I find this position utterly crazy because it makes it impossible to criticise the law, so in Iran the law is quite correct and homosexuality is completely wrong and homosexuals should be hung but in the UK the law is also completely correct and homosexuality is completely fine.
There are also those who seem to just have a brute conviction copyright infringement is either wrong or not and can’t/won’t back this up with anything. To me this brute intuition seems a very dubious basis for morality because it leaves no room for moral argument and I can’t see why you’d be able to rationally maintain any moral beliefs in the face of moral disagreement. I believe most of these people to have no rational basis for their morality and are in fact simply reflecting social norms.
Finally there are the moral relativist who don’t believe there’s a fact of the matter about whether copyright infringement is right or wrong. They don’t seem to speak up much but I know quite a lot of moral relativists are out there and I suspect a lot of pirates on the street are probably moral relativists at least until they thought about it. I find this completely dreadful because it doesn’t allow that anyone can be morally wrong about anything, so again Josef Mengele never did anything wrong.
I’m guessing a fair few pirates are also ethical egoists (or selfish amoral bastards for short) who believe that what’s right is to act in there own self-interest so if they can get away without paying they should because it’s in their interest to hold onto their money. This seems like a really fundamental mistake about the nature of morality to me.
There must also be Kantian’s, those who follow a golden rule like ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ or something similar. I think copyright infringement makes an interesting and problematic case for such people because I suspect there are people with this view in both camps, probably a lot of the idealistic open-source types who hate all forms of copyright and also a lot of people who would wish to maintain control of anything they’d make and thus condemn copyright infringement.
Then there are the utilitarians, people who believe that broadly speaking it’s only wrong if it creates a net decrease in happiness. A lot of rational pirates seem to fall into this category and they attempt to argue about whether or not copyright infringement hurts anyone. There are also a fair few anti-copyright infringement types who hold this moral philosophy but who hold that copyright infringement is harmful (I count myself among them).
To my mind there are only interesting discussions to be had about whether or not copyright infringement is morally wrong if one of the last two positions is a stated starting assumption because if any of the other positions are taken then the moral status of copyright infringement isn’t really open to discussion and if we wish to argue between the positions then it probably isn’t wise to discuss them purely in the context of copyright infringement, that would be crazy.
So with that in mind it seems that ‘the affront’ is some form of utilitarian (piracy allows him to reward only good games and will thus improve games for everyone in the long run) so the challenge for ‘kevlar’ or anyone else who wishes to condemn ‘the affront’ is to give an argument as to why copyright infringement is harmful or give a general argument against utilitarianism.
Similarly for discussions of DRM and consumer rights in general if a proper moral argument is to be made one way or the other we need to state first if what moral framework is being assumed and replies must either share the same framework or directly challenge it otherwise we simply end up with these huge threads of people throwing insults and talking past each other.
@ RPS
The problem with this article is the lack of clarification. The use of Brad Wardell’s quote here implies that piracy is the fault to blame. But it is not and even agreed by Brad himself. Please read Brad’s recent update at
http://forums.demigodthegame.com/347467.
RPS, you can do better!
@thinkingork, dude : http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/46194/102-000-Pirates-Overload-Demigods-Online-Infrastructure
tell me he is not blaming piracy of “slamming” his servers, he tuned it down later, yes, but he did say it
@JKjoker
the article you linked is published on 16th, the one I linked is published on 17th. Maybe Brad changed his mind overnight. Anyway, this RPS article is published on 18th, so it should had used up-to-date information.
@JKjoker: On the public declaration, the guys say is not piracy, in bold letters with underline. I suppose the bold font is enough, so the underline was like overdoing it…. Anyway, is true, the guys are simply telling the whole history, and admiting his errors. Behind honest. The problem with The Truth and Honesty, is that a “News Title” is not enough space to fit the truth. Ask the journalism here. So you have to go with the next cool thing…
Even the people here, myself, got somewhat lost in translation.
Deletotron has just had a huge breakfast of childish angry comments. Om nom nom nom.
To be fair – I intend to purchase this game when it is released in the UK – currently the 15th May.
I refuse to pay the mad online prices for it at the moment – and I will be waiting for shopto.net who have the game for £17.99.
Given that there was no demo, online prices being too expensive and the delayed UK retail launch – I picked up an “evaluation” version.
All this ranting over pirates is nonsense … release a game properly and you wouldn’t have as many problems !!!
It’s funny to see Wardell tripping over himself trying to retract his statements about piracy so he doesn’t lose the elitist crowd who is desperate to prove that piracy isn’t a problem with PC gaming. Anyone can tell his original posts on the subject were clear in saying piracy is a huge problem with this title and the platform.
And yes, Stardock has had DRM all along with Stardock Central and Impulse. What else would you call having to install a third party game manager just to update games purchased legally from a store? Most of you are just in denial that you fell for their ‘We have no DRM, support us revolutionaries!’ marketing spiel.
Interesting how you choose to focus on the worst extreme…
How many of those 97% of games scored around the 60-80% mark, were actually fun if you gave them a chance, but apparently weren’t good enough to warrent even paying a £10 budget release (Which may be too late, I’m aware of one developer not living long enough to see the game arrive on the shelves)… Of the developers that made those games, how many failed because of dissapointing sales and how many of them might’ve been able to carry lessons from previous projects forward to the next ones. The next games might have been 85%, then 90% and everyone would be talking about those ones for years to come.
Its bizarre how hysterical people are about defending game ratings in reviews if we’re then grabbing a pirate copy to make our own minds up and after having had a couple of hours with the game, then written it off purely because its not a 95% game. After having spent a couple of hours with the game – If it was so truly awful, you wouldn’t have got passed 5 minutes of it, yet alone a few hours… Maybe those hours are actually worth something, you know?
There are plenty of games that have shown real promise but just didn’t sell well, the latest Tomb Raider was a very well made game (imho) but it failed to meet sales expectations by about 500k. Mirrors Edge and Dead Space are well thought off for what they are trying to do yet apparently these have fared poorly in the market as well.
Then you’ve got Startopia, a game that deserved to sell, was well thought of by many journalists and just didn’t sell.
problem is the industry needs crazy amounts of sales for a single game to break even, deu to the huge team sizes and dev costs of games. And nowadays, paying 60 euro’s for a game isnt something i do anymore.
Yaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrr
@Larrington:
““It is a well-known fact that a very small proportion of games published become successful in the marketplace. In 1999, fewer than 3% of PC Games available on the market, and about 12% of console titles, sold more than 100,000 copies – a figure that is itself often far below the breakeven point [Laramée00].””
First of all, their games failing to break even is very much their own fault, not some mythical pirates’ – it’s what happens when you make games that would have to sell millions and millions of copies to break even. Make. Cheaper. Games. You might have noticed that games that are made on a budget (Sins of a good example) more than break even – they’re hugely profitable.
Secondly, you ignore the historical precedent, yet again. We’ve heard your spiel before, verabtim – it’s not realistic in the slightest.
Just looking back – the companies that tend to do well support their games long after sale, and most of them have a significant online portion that is off limits to most of the pirates … the trick is to obviously support your games long term and through the demonstration of this there is a benefit which most people will buy into.
Too many games are released half finished and get patched up later (if ever) … due to the poor quality control and the lack of demos people are always going to be more inclined to try out an “evaluation” copy before parting with their £££ – the problem here is that only a very few games are worth playing for more than an hour, so a fair % of the people with the “evaluation” copy do not purchase the original, but neither do they continue to play the game. This isn’t a lost sale due to piracy – this is a lost sale due to a crap game !!!
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something in the devs comments but …
Dam wierd quote code :)
Above meant to quote -
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.
@ JKjoker
Oh but you’re getting it all wrong. According to those with their heads buried in the sand, thats not DRM. It just decides to call home to check if GPG left the stove on.
Don’t say that too loudly lest you attract the ire of the lynch mob.
As to the piracy is responsible for declining game sales. That, as I’ve always said, it is a load of horseshit. Fact is, good games will sell – piracy or not. Bad games will fail – piracy or not.
It is easy to blame it all on piracy because, well, its easy. But if you imply that there are more pirates who like the game enough to steal it, than there are those who like it enough to pay for it, then maybe that pub/dev needs to look at the games they’re developing.
I’ve been in business for some 20+ odd years. Sure my games get pirated, but the fact is that because I cater to an elitist crowd – who apparently like my games – I have been able to continue cranking out games. In all my history, from Usenet to now, you won’t find a SINGLE post, press release, interview or whatever with my clamouring that piracy affects my game sales. I’m still in business.
Same with Stardock and most others. Sure, if you can make $5, why settle for $2? The goal is to ensure that your game is worth $5 to those who like it enough to pay for it. If you don’t make a game that enough people find worth $5, then you’re well and truly farked.
I have a crazy idea. How about discussing what Brad/Stardock actually is saying, instead of what you dream up in your heads? I know, it’s crazy, and probably not as self-satisfying, but still:
Well, what a dramatic week it’s been. The teams at Stardock and GPG have been burning the midnight oil this week.
As those of you who have the game can already see, the server issues are gone. We’ve recreated a duplicate of the server infrastructure we had but dedicated to users who have the most recent version of the game and a valid CD key (serial #).
Based on the logs, we are seeing lots of games being played on-line now. Yay. Average game has approximately 4.7 humans in it which is a good sign.
Some clarifications
I’ve seen a lot of news articles this week and a lot of confusion about what occurred this week. The issue isn’t terribly complicated.
Ars Technica had a good article that describes what happened. But still, a lot of people seem to think warez users are able to play multiplayer games. No, they can’t. Even the retail box has a serial # in it that users have to use and be validated to play online. What brought down servers was a lot more benign than that. It was the HTTPS requests to inform users if there was a new version along with checking the community features for info (friends lists, chat channels, etc.) and things like that. Things like that are pretty piddly. It’s only when you get a ton of users doing that at the same time that it becomes a problem as we saw.
But here’s the thing: While piracy is annoying, you can’t blame piracy for this problem. Let’s face it, there’s plenty of data out there about how many pirated games are being played. We should have looked at that. We assumed since Sins of a Solar Empire and Galactic Civilizations, both of which sold extremely well and got great reviews, that the # of pirated copies of Demigod in use would probably be in the same ballpark, maybe twice as much. But had we looked at what other publishers have said, we would have known that it’s not unusual for there to be hundreds of thousands of warez copies in use. And if we had, we could have simply had the retail version not have any HTTP calls in it and instead just had an update button on the main menu to check for updates and voila, problem solved.
The second misconception is the argument that because Demigod’s retail version is heavily pirated that it costs massive sales. But that, again, puts the blame on the wrong parties. If you want to talk about the horrible multiplayer experience on launch day, well, that’s our fault because of what I said above. If you want to say that the horrible day 1 multiplayer experience resulted in negative game reviews which will seriously damage the game’s sales then I say again, that’s our fault too because of what I said above OR we could have just sent out the review copies on release day (Tuesday) and reviewers wouldn’t have had it until Thursday by which point the problem had largely been resolved and the review scores would have been fine. But in either case, it’s still our fault.
So now what?
Now that the servers are working fine we’re moving away from the “#$R@#@# Demigod sux!” posts and into the regular new game release issues.
So what issues are we seeing and working on? Here are a few at the top of our lists:
1. Players getting disconnected during games. Demigod’s lag tolerance is fairly low resulting in disconnects if a player lags out a bit. This is fairly easy to fix. You get a player in Australia playing a user in Europe and there will be times when there’s a hicup in their connection and POW, disconnect and it’s extremely frustrating. I played all day today and it happened to me. This is a very high priority.
2. NAT negotiation. For users outside the United States in particular using DSL, this is a problem. This is a case where player A can’t see player B and thus they can’t play together. This is something we will be aggressively looking at next week. If we hadn’t had the server overload, we likely would have this addressed already.
3. Pantheon games. Right now, the system is excessively biased for new players – it wants to include AI players as cannon fodder. While this is fine and dandy for new players, once you know what you’re doing, having AI players in the game is incredibly annoying. So next week we’re going to change it so that if you have played a few games, it will wean the player off of AI players until you only play humans online. Same for Skirmish.
4. Favor Points and such. There’s some annoying stuff happening with favor points which is related to the ranking system in Demigod as well. First off, we plan to reset the rankings at some point when we enter Epoch 1 (we are in Epoch 0 presently game-wise, I’ll explain Epochs later but in short, every so often we’re going to reset the rankings, save the results as an epoch and go from there). In Epoch 1, custom games won’t count anymore as there’s too many ways to game it.
5. Misc. Bugs. There was a crush bug in the game that we’ve fixed internally but it got to be too late in the evening to package it up and get it released tonight. We have internally fixed the annoying issue of “A ppplayer has left the game” at the start of skirmish and pantheon games. Basically, when you get a new game going, there’s some data that has to be exchanged between players at the start. But the threshold of time you’re given to do this before it decides you’re too slow is set too low so we’re changing this to be more tolerant. In our tests with players we found on the chat channel who were having problems, it took care of it.
So that’s what we have in store for next week. After that, we can look at the typical balance requests, cheese stuff, and whatever else crops up.
Now, while the reviews are likely to have a pretty serious impact on sales, it does not affect our plans to continue to release updates and enhancements to the game nor does it affect our plans to release additional free Demigods.
For most of you, have fun this weekend! For those of you who are having a problem with something, hang in there. We’ve got your back!
@theleif – so basically they are saying that now they have a seperate setup for people with legit copies, they have found that the online mode is kicking players, people can;t see each other in game if they are using DSL, you get paired with AI players rather than real players more than wanted, the ranking system is borked … other than that everything is tickerty-boo … ooh, except that they have seen teh scores they are going to get and they are craptastic … hmm, sounds like a successful launch to me !!! :p
Persus-9: I’ve missed that apparently raging Kevlar guy you’re replying to due to delicious sleep, but: pretty much, yeah.
The only time I see piracy as morally wrong is when one would have the means and inclination to buy a game were it not for piracy. If one only tries it with no prior intent to purchase (and might then even be persuaded to DO buy it if it turns out to be good), to judge its quality, or even plays the whole damn thing but would honestly NOT have bought it due to piracy and judging it bad value for the money (yes, slippery slope there of self-delusion to save a few bucks, but still) or being too poor, then I really don’t understand why people think it’s morally wrong.
My theory is that those people have a rather shallow, not consciously scrutinized copy of morality and would if it were not for some arbitrary rules deeming it illegal very much pirate everything they’d ever want themselves – they’re angry because they feel FORCED to pay for something while others do not, not because they honestly feel it’s worth their money and is an effort worth supporting (or maybe are just small minded and expect everyone to like the same games they do exactly as much as they do, one of the two).
The only problem I can see with this “responsible piracy” are bargain bin titles not selling, as Larington said. But as he also said, by the time many games get that far, the original developers often don’t see any money of that, so.. I’m not sure how bad a problem it really is.
Anyway, for the bottom line: I realize my ramblings require a probably utopian degree of honesty/basic decency from the general pirate/consumer for piracy to have no negative impact whatsoever, thus _IF_ there was a completely non-intrusive, cheap and actually working type of DRM (multiplayer CD keys are the closest to it I can think of) for single player combined with demos showing about 25% of the full game at release plus being able to return a game for any reason (after all, DRM works now, no reason not to), I’d be all for it. But yeah, that’s pretty utopian itself.
tl;dr: if a pirate is essentially a decent human being, then there is nothing wrong with him being a pirate
@ Mac
You do realize that he’s from the Stardock/GPG team, right?
@Mac: Never said all is well. They have borked the launch and they admit it. Thats my point. Also, it would be nice if people stopped saying that Stardock is against drm. Thats just not true. Their stand on DRM is that cumbersome drm is a hassle for paying customers and seldom prevent people from pirating anyway. Impulse is their form of drm. No cd check or protection on their games, but if you want to get updates and extra content, you need to log into impulse. Their DRM is meant to be a carrot and not a whip. This clearly didn’t work out this time (so far).
@dsmart I’m not. Wouldnt mind if i was, though, they seem like a nice company to work for. But i’ll sort of like living in sweden.
Alright, let’s get off the horrible piracy issue for a minute, and into a tangential issue – it has been noted that the Day-1 reviews have been knocking points off (quite significant numbers, in some places) for technical issues.
If these technical issues are fixed a week or two later, should the reviews amend and adjust their scores to match the actual state of the product, or should they stick to their guns in order to punish the studio for releasing something with bugs?
I’m firmly in the former group, but there seem to be a lot of people who believe that once a review has been written, that it should be set in stone. What side do you fall on?
@theleif : the GPG dudes can say whatever they want and change what they said three times a day, the fact is they released a multiplayer only game (that includes an afterthought single player “training” mode) with a broken multiplayer component, weeeeeeeee, lets line up to kiss and bow to them.
@theleif
The perspective of your post seemed to indicate that you worked from them. I just noticed that you were doing a cut and paste job without actually indicating such. Hence the confusion.
btw, nobody here is saying they’re good, bad or ugly. And I don’t see anyone making any such personal attacks. It has all been about the game itself afaik.
@Dominic: PC gaming sites should definitely have running reviews for patched games and MMOs. If the devs work their assess off to genuinely improve and fix a game, they should at least get a fair shake. For example, MMOs significantly change, for better or worse, if they survive long enough, perhaps negating the original review. Reviews and purchases don’t have to be made at release and then suddenly stop.
As more publishers and studios follow the “games as service” model preached by Valve, these “set in stone” reviews will become even less relevant. Right now, I vastly prefer the more informal “wot I think” and AARs and news updates found on RPS, one of the few sites I’ve found that actually does rolling reviews.
@JKjoker
I can’t see how me writing that they admit to have borked up the launch make me an asskisser. Anyway, you are one of the few persons commenting on the actual issue: the launch of a multiplayer-centric game with serious network issues. The rest of the posts are mostly unrelated rant. And, as i understand it, the netcode is actually stardocks and not GPG:s. I believe they are using the “impulse reaktor” netcode.
@Dominic White
I agree. I know IGN plans to do a re-review. Unfortunally, it probably won’t show up on the metacricics page.
@Ah, sorry about that. I’m not good with html tags, so i didnt use them. It was a quote from Brad Wardell on the stardock forum.
Should have been: @dsmart
@Myros: “Maybe I’m misunderstanding something in the devs comments but …”
They can differentiate, because only legit users get the update, because it’s only availible via Impulse (for which you need a legit CD Key) – old version game, pirates – new version game, legit.
I can’t speak for Demigod, but Sins of a Solar Empire doesn’t have DRM. You need a valid CD key to receive updates and access the servers, which makes sense. But there’s no restriction on playing, installing, or reselling the game as you purchased it on the original disc. The only thing being managed is your right to connect to someone else’s server.
@Rich_P
But when you register the game on impulse to get the update, you bind your serial to your account, don’t you? And, having to do that to get patches, is a form of Digital Rights Managemet.
ITT:Everyone knows everything ever, about both the hypothetical and the factual.
Y’know, believe it or not, a company has the right to at least *try* to protect their product. Whether or not DRM works is not a valid point of contention. Does it REALLY fucking inconvience you THAT fucking much to register a CD-Key to get your patches?
Also, I brought up how long the devs worked, merely to show that the devs didn’t just release a broken game. They saw the problem, and they fixed it.
Works fine now, I just spent five hours playing the game.
You know what else has shitty netcode? Source. No one damns Valve for facestabs, lagging hit boxes, shooting someone in the chest and getting a headshot, ect. ect.
Why? Team Fortress 2 is an amazing game despite netcode problems.
Same with Demigod, and I stand by that.
Well this whole debacle may increase awareness and raise sales. I wasn’t really going to buy this before because, although I’d heard about it, it had mainly slipped under my radar. This has brought it to my attention more and it sounds like I may enjoy it. Now I think I shall give it maybe about a week to fix stuffs and then I’ll probably get it.
Also I’d like to agree with Persus-9 that a major problem with the piracy debate (not piracy, the arguments surrounding it) is people judging it based on different moral standards. And it’s very difficult to convince someone that their moral standard is inferior to yours.
I might buy this. In fact, I still need to buy SoaSE (ohnoes, I feel bad for not having done so already). I’m the type who’s too afraid of strategy to go online but I do like massive stompy things. And having used Impluse; it’s not bad. For a while it mucked around with my game keys but meh.
@Psychopomp: you know whats easier than registering to patch the game ? not needing to patch the game
the most problematic thing about the Stardock/Steam protection schemes is that they encourage the “release beta crap, patch later” tactic since you want to enforce the registration and you can get real time info from your “players” (AKA “betatesters”) plus you can gather priceless marketing data at the same time for FREE! and they don’t even get a choice not to send you that info or even know what you are gathering (programs running, size of porn collection, chat logs, email backups, explorer history, who knows!!)……… Sweet!
“programs running, size of porn collection, chat logs, email backups, explorer history, who knows!!”
Thats conspiracytheoricrafting for the sake of conspiracytheoricrafting. You can say *any* program that call home and use a unknom protocol could do as you say. I think is better to assume that these programs only send the information that say that send, and then have some dude somewhere run a tiny tcpdump program to check.
Maybe santaclaus is stealing childrens, “you don’t know!”.
@Tei: “DRM !== copy protection. A DRM system is a tool to extend the control of the author over the product, removing freedom from the owner of the copy. A copy protection system, is just a system to make a copy limited to one user, and stop him from making copys that work for other people.”
No. Copy-protection = DRM = “digital rights management” (where reproduction is a right being managed). There are many forms of DRM, some which are relatively consumer-friendly and others which are very anti-consumer, but *all* modern copy-protection is DRM – right down to the simple disc-in-drive check. (You could make the argument that the old-school manual check a la Loom or Prince of Persia is more “analog” rights management, tho. ;) )
You can use whatever private terminology you’d like, and I’m not trying to tell you how to define things in your own head. The important thing is to recognize, as Derek pointed out, that all modern copy-protection tech is a form of DRM.