Demigod Piracy Update

Stardock's Brad Wardell has dropped off some clarification on the piracy stuff Demigod was hit with and here's the whole bevy of information below.

"First of all, the 18,000 figure is the # of concurrent users at the peak – not sales.

On the Steam stats page, for instance, you can see the peak concurrent users on titles that talk to Steam:

Current Players - Peak Today - Game

• 81,543 - 90,824 - Counter-Strike: Source
• 57,343 - 68,662 - Counter-Strike
• 18,788 - 23,755 - Football Manager 2009
• 14,577 - 15,606 - Empire: Total War
• 14,394 - 16,430 - Left 4 Dead
• 11,860 - 14,030 - Team Fortress 2

So just above Empire Total War in terms of peak connections (game just launched so it's not a surprise).

The infrastructure was designed to handle up to 50,000 of these connections.

But on day 0, there were around 140,000 concurrent users of which 18,000 are validated.

Pirated users can't get updates or play multiplayer but they still touch the servers.

So over the first 24 hours, we had to essentially scrap together a doppleganger of the infrastructure dedicated to Demigod's multiplayer network needs, release an update to legitimate users to point them to it.

The result was that in the first day, day and a half, users couldn't connect to each other (the connection servers would time out) and even the in game experience was horrible getting through menus and such because even a simple HTTP keep alive call (something as simple as a http call to check for the latest version to inform users if there's a new version) would cause the in game UI to hang.

The consequence is two-fold: First, early customers got a TERRRIBLE experience. Second, the reviews (notably Gamespot) based their review on this terrible experience.

Now today, day 3, it's pretty much taken care of. Users are connecting in multiplayer, the servers are pretty responsive and we're adding more in preparation for the weekend.

If there's any IT people here, they can probably better explain than I can what we've had to do essentially. It's not like we keep a room full of unused servers so the challenge of putting together a duplicate series of servers in 24 hours PLUS Stardock and GPG having to produce an update to the game to point to those servers was quite an undertaking."

I just got my boxed copy of Demigod today and so far I find it addicting as hell. Demigod will receive a fair review whenever it gets written up and posted.