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.
Demigod faces piracy issues
Demigod was released early by Gamestop and it seems to have caused quite a stir. The early release rushed the developers into quickly turning the servers on over Easter weekend, and also allowed people to make copies for the warez folks. It seems that there was a VERY large number of pirates that grabbed Demigod and the massive amount of traffic they caused sorta broke the Demigod servers. Oops!
The problem is that when the Demigod devs released the numbers--140,000 total, of which 18,000 were legitmate connections, a lot of people jumped to conclusions and blamed those nasty pirates. It seems that they didn't read and realize that no, it wasn't 18,000 copies sold, but 18,000 concurrent LEGIT connections ( the other 120,000 or so were the pirates). The issue was that each time the game was launched, it sent a small http request to the Gas Powered Games' servers to check for updates, etc. That really isn't a problem if you are looking at maybe 50,000 or so connections, but 140,000 was more than they expected. The people who blame pirates thought the server issues were caused by pirates playing on the multiplayer servers (Cant do that.. need a valid impulse account witch is tied to a valid cd-key).
The main reason I love Stardock is the lack of DRM-and hassle that gives- in their games. I also love them because they don't take the easy route and just blame the pirates for their server issues.
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.
Gas Powered Games takes the high road and recognizes that this could have been avoided, but lets face it, hindsight is 20/20. They did a good job in letting people know what happened and why. You can read the whole thread in their forums here.
I played Demigod down at my local iGames center, Treasure I-Lan. They have a showcase going on for Demigod, and I would suggest trying to find your nearest center to head down there and give it a try!