There is no learning curve, no tutorial is needed. Once you play the game a few times you know pretty much everything you need to know. A few more times you’ve seen all there is to see (unless they add more)

So unless you just love this exact Genre it is not going to be for you. Just like if you don’t LOVE WW2 eastern from FPS shooters you’re not going to play Red Orchestra for very long.

it’s a derivative RTS

It really isn’t.

A few hours in single player and you notice it has a steep learning curve, zero tutorial, no single-player campaign/story a la Warcraft or Starcraft, uninspired animation and level design, few characters to select from (very few useful characters), shallow character advancement/items and rapidly starts to feel like a repetitive clickfest. Note I haven’t even mentioned the multiplayer and netcode issues they should be able to fix in a few weeks.

In short, it’s a derivative RTS, and not worth $40. Test drive it and uninstall.

Let me just ask one simple question. Are there pirated copies of DRM-protected games? To the same extent? Spore, Mass Effect, Bioshock all have DRM and all have been pirated. So then, would have DRM prevented this?

No.

When a pirate downloads a game off of the internet, it comes working. (For the most part) The DRM has already been cleaned out of it. That is why its a pirated copy. So then, with regards to the install limit of that Spore or Mass Effect has, who is more effected, the pirate or the customer. The pirate has a game without the install limit, the customer does not.

If Demigod came with DRM, would it have prevented this? You have got to be kidding yourself if you think it would have.

Also, the amount of people talking about this who didn’t rtfa is crazy. There is a cd-key. You have to be registered to get patches or to play online. The problems were caused by having over 100,000 computers checking for updates when they expected 50,000. So why don’t all those people asking why they didn’t use CD-Keys go rtfa…

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.

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!”.

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!

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.

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.