Demigod got got 18k sales, but 100k pirates?

no 18k legit people online at a time I believe, while 100k pirates on at once.

they dont are allowed. They just try to connect, and this is making the servers go crazy. But they cannot play online and cannot log in.

I personally think, that this will be good for demigod, as most people, who normally wont have bought it, now can test, and if only 50% of them decides to pay for it to play online and have stats and co, Demigod will sell very good.

They aren't. Whoever wrote that article didn't bother to actually read what Brad wrote.

Pre-patch day2 patch, the game made server calls on the main menu and a few other places for things like update checks. The pirate copies don't get patches, so even though our games have these checks removed, theirs don't.

The caveat is that there's no easy way to distinguish between pirate copies and legit-but-not-updated store-bought copies, so they can't just pull the plug on those servers. Instead, we got our own and they've kept the "beta" servers active for the non-updated games.

The pirated copies can not get patches or play anything other than LAN/Hamachi and SP.

theres upsides and downsides to it

if the pirates are allowed in, lots of ppl to play with

if not..some of em might buy it

But its on shelves now more ppl will keep buying it

Kotaku got it wrong. Brad was talking about SIMULATENEOUS connections. Thats 18,000 legit customers trying to connect at the same time and not 18,000 sales. However it certainly shows, and possibly due to the lack of a demo, that the warez copies of the game got a lot of attention.

I don't know if it's lack of a demo so much as the Gamestop breaking street date allowing the disc image to pop up on torrents before the game's actual release.

If you can't determine who's pirate and who's store-bought-unpatched, how do you know there were 18k legit and 100k bullshit connections? Sorry, just need it explained cause I don't get it.

What does that have to do with simultaneous connections?

 Because 18k are logged into impulse since the game asks you for a login/password and the rest are just hammering the server without authenticating so its easy to distinguish. Now stardock just needs to block them outright and problem will get solved.

Well, I am not sure if Gamestop really increased the problem of piracy. Normally, games don't need to be in the store to get pirated- look at all the games that ended up on torrents because plantworkers leaked them etc.

There is no distinction between pirates and store-bought-unpatched. How do you know how many are pirates?

Its very well explained in the Demigod: Day 2 Status Report! thread, i can't understand how there is so much confusion in this thread.

Read more assume less, you ppl don't even read each other posts right.

I believe problem is with updating on startup, which was removed in D2 patch, but pirates don't have that patch, so every time they launch game they hammer server for updates they can't even get. Solution would be changing DNS/IP game originaly connect to, so pirates without patch won't have chance to anyhow contact servers. We can just update using impulse to new IP and no problem. Or maybe I'm talking crap.

It was loading impulse friends list and such and checking things right when you loaded the game.

While yeah it sucks that people pirate, it really wasn't the pirates fault.. IT shouldn't of been calling the servers untill people tried to log in.  Then unregistered and priates woudln't of mattered. Pirates would just have tried multiplayer once, saw it doesn't work with a pirated copy, and not try again.

Because the game didn't leak when it was in manufacturing.  The game leaked immediately after the Gamestop early release.

I'm not sure why anyone calls it a leak when it was most likely a normal retail buyer who put it up on the pirate networks.

120,000 pirates on at the same time? I just don't believe that. Check how many downloads this game has on the popular filesharing servers and add them together. The number doesn't even come close, and you expect me to believe they all logged on simultaneously?

Its much more believable that there were about 5,000 uses pinging the servers multiple times due to the rediculous way the game makes requests ALL THE TIME, e.g. when you leave the intro sequence.

20K sales in the 1st week isn't bad though is it?   I mean I know more people that have purchased demigod than I do any other recent PC game release (that isn't saying that much, since there haven't been many other big titles, but still)

Well, I don't care. If theres one thing stardock seem to do, it's look out for me, the consumer. I'd prefer to wait a few days for them to sort it out than have my rights abused.

Can't you see who is a pirate and who isn't by the serial number? When I bought the game I had to put in a serial number to register it, how did the pirates do this?

Yeah, really. This is absolutely possible.

Another thing that these articles do not mention is how often even DRM-heavy games are pirated. Most evidence shows that DRM does little in the long run to disuade pirates (as it only takes one to find a flaw in the system and to exploit it), though it hurts legitimate customers greatly.

In fact, most PC titles have a pirating rate near or greatly exceeding 50% anyway. For example, depsite its extremely draconian SecurROM DRM, Spore had 2 million legitimate buyers at the end of 2008, whereas it downloaded illegaly 1.7 million times (http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=203383). Obviously, its DRM did little to discourage pirating, though it did encourage users to develop pirating skills (http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/features/spores-drm-trained-legions-of-pirates-says-halpin/?biz=1). To this end, EA has released a tool that would disactivate SecurROM DRM for its games (http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/31/1917254&from=rss).

On the other hand, World of Goo showed us that releasing a game with no DRM yields the same rates of pirating as those released with DRM (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21123). At least in this case effort was saved on the programmers' part with having to impliment a DRM, and legitimate buyers of the game (such as myself) were not punished for being honest and fair.

Now Spore's 46% rate of piracy hardly compares to an 85% rate of pirating, but I personally don't believe that that many users have pirated Demigod, and there is something wrong with the statistic if it is only taken from server request data.

They didn't. The game was making server calls when loading the main menu after the intro movie, for starters. No registration or anything required.

lol argue against DRM all you want, but like it or not it's a necessary evil...