Demigod: Piracy does not mean lost sales
So it seems Demigod is selling strong, despite issues with piracy (or "unathorized" copies) at launch. Now Stardock's CEO has posted in their forum to make it clear that, while nobody likes unauthorized copies, HIS job is to not focus on the pirates but on the actual customers.
From Frogboy @Stardock
If I wrote a post saying that Demigod sales were far below what we had hoped for and I said that the reason was due to piracy and that the answer was that we should have put some nasty copy protection on those DVDs to have prevented early piracy what do you think people would say?
I know what my answer to that would be. I would say that Stardock couldn’t blame poor sales on piracy but rather the fact that the game’s built-in multiplayer match-making was totally broken for the first day of release due to its underestimation of network resources that a mainstream game would take and even when that got addressed, the multiplayer match-making for two weeks and counting has been incredibly flakey which affected reviews and word of mouth. That’s what I would say.
But if you look at the charts for retail game sales, Demigod is #3 in retail (that doesn't count online sales though). So even though Demigod was massively pirated at launch, they still were number three in retail game sales. Frogboy goes on to say that:
The reality that most PC game publishers ignore is that there are people who buy games and people who don’t buy games. The focus of a business is to increase its sales. My job, as CEO of Stardock, is not to fight worldwide piracy no matter how much it aggravates me personally. My job is to maximize the sales of my product and service and I do that by focusing on the people who pay my salary – our customers.
I really think that more business' should get with this kind of thinking; there are people who simply don't pay for games no matter what. A company can waste quite a bit of energy and resources "fighting pirates" and losing, or they can focus on serving their customers and making money. It seems more intelligent to focus on your customers than wasting time and energy on people that will never be one.