only drm that is effective requires server authentication, even then if the game doesn't have to be played online it will be work around. Ultimatly the game and its online content have to be compelling enough to get players to buy it.

"In fact, most PC titles have a pirating rate near or greatly exceeding 50% anyway."

So most PC games have a 50% pirate rate, but Demigod happens to have a 1000% pirate rate. Strike you as a little odd?

That does strike me as odd.  1000% of the games owned are pirated.  That IS an interesting statistic!

But seriously.. 50% includes DRM and other cracks.  A game that has *zero* will be downloaded more, plus the demographic playing this game might have more pirates

If the problem is that the pirates are using a version that is not patched  to stop the automatic checking, would it be probable to host a patch for the pirate copies of Demigod to stop this?

Though it sounds like such a simple solution so it probably won't solve the problem.

First of all, the way that % rates of piracy have been calculated in this thread is (# users with pirated versions)/(# total users). If the article quoted here is correct, this sets DG's pirating rate at 85%, not 1000%.

Secondly, different video games have wildly different % rates of piracy for whatever reason. Some games with DRM have rates as high as 90% (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350). Some have lower rates of piracy.

As of early March 2008, the rate of PC game piracy was estimated to be somewhere between 75-85% for all games, most of which have DRM (http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/165488/hard-times-pc-game-piracy-in-us-estimated-at-75-80/). As noted in the article, sales on consoles of Bioshock were nearly 5 to 1 on consoles vs. PCs, and sales of Call of Duty 4 were nearly 10 to 1. It's belived that the difference in the popularity of console gaming vs. PC gaming cannot account for this, especially considering that these hardcore FPSs are often preferred to play on computers.

That's what's making me frustrated about these articles on DG and World of Goo: they are not comparing these rates of piracy for non-DRM games to rates of piracy for DRM games. As anyone who does work with statistics will tell you, stastics are meaningless without comparisson to a control.

But isn't it somehow possible for stardock to see if the person connected to their server has a serial-number? If they don't they are pirates, so stardock could ban them from the game?

The problem isn't that pirates are playing games on Stardock servers (they can't). The problem is that retail / warez copies are programmed to call stardock servers when launched to see if there are updates available. See here  http://forums.demigodthegame.com/347467  

The gaming media is all over this, naturally claiming lack of DRM is the problem. But the trouble is, Stardock released numbers but where can we find something to compare it to? 88% of players at one moment in time trying to connect to servers were pirates, but what are the piracy rates (if we should even call it that) of other games with DRM. Is it really that different? I had heard it was very high only the companies aren't as open about the numbers (or just don't have a lot of credibility when they do talk about them). I am guessing at any given time, there are almost always more pirated copies of a game being played than legit purchases for most games.

Most likely then need to redo the server layout. So new retail copies can

get upgraded and redirected to new servers .. I'm hoping they are working

on a workaround like this ...

Didn't SD said that they moved the server already? So now basically all the pirated/unpatched retail will be trying to connect to a non existing server, which soon will get the timeout or worst. That'd solve the pirated problem already imo.