Left 4 Dead Survival pack Released!

Valve has finally released the promised DLC for Left 4 Dead. Boot up your steam client and it will auto update your copy of Left 4 Dead with the new Survival Pack released today.

Check your local retailers as valve also made an announcement for some price cuts to L4D as well.

Battlefield 1943 reaches Alpha Stage

As reported here: http://planetbattlefield.gamespy.com/fullstory.php?id=157850

Battlefield 1943 hit reached Alpha stage of the development cycle.



I sure enjoyed the BF1942/Vietnam games but disliked BF2 and BF2142 due many unfixed bugs.

Judge Says Summer Redstone treated Midway like a toy?

From the WTF Dept comes article from the embattled Midway games label currently in court over it's Bankruptcy crapola.

If you care then go here :http://www.joystiq.com/2009/04/21/judge-says-sumner-redstone-treated-midway-like-a-toy/


I feel Midway Games should just fail and go out of business. They had several good IP's but none of them seemed to be ground breaking enough to gain sales to keep the game developer/ publisher giant in business.

Microsoft Working on Windows 8?

Apparently Microsoft is already hard at work on Windows 8 claims this address: http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/04/20/microsoft.begins.windows.8/

I hope this a indication that we won't see huge gaps between new OS releases. XP to VISTA was just long enough for me.

Xbox 360 Elite GOTY Bundle Coming in May?

Spotted this listing on Amazon for a new Xbox 360 Elite bundle coming in May of this year(next month).

Have a look here: http://www.amazon.com/Xbox-360-Elite-Halo-Fable-Bundle/dp/B0026GQ8WA/ref=sr_tr_1?ie=UTF8&s=aps&qid=1240283139&sr=8-1

This new Xbox 360 Bundle includes GOTY HIts Halo 3 and Fable 2.

Oh boy this is one hell of a bundle indeed folks :)

Future News Postings Timeline

I would like to put out a notice to those of you who view this blog on a daily basis. News Postings will occur daily, however if there is a slow news day in which not much to post related to this blog then posts will happen in the evenings at latest.

I am being pretty stingy on what to post and what not to post. If it falls into the DRM and general gaming caetgory I have to pick and choose what to post as it is already.

I hope this clears some issues up that some have contacted me about already.


More to come later on today.

GameBizBlog.com Interviews Brad Wardell

Stardocks Brad Wardell sounds off with GameBizBlog.com in a lengthy interview. Demigod, Securom and others are covered. It's too long to post here so vist this address below.

GameBizBlog:http://www.gamebizblog.com/gamebizblog/2009/04/interview-brad-wardell.html



Nice interesting point of view from Brad Wardell on the publisher using Securom too. Mostly I took his comments in this way even though he didn't say it like that "Your morons for putting activations/ install limits on your games. "

He does make some good points on current and future DRM games relating to what if said developer/publisher goes out of business and you want to play said game and it can't the find activation server stuff. Go to the address above and read all about it.

Enjoy the Weekend!

Well folks it seems the common cold has hit me finally and I'm feeling a bit drained. It's Spring time so this was expected as I usually get hit hard during this time of year and then I'm cold free for a good 10 months.

Anywhoo, Not much news happening this weekend from what I saw. I would encourage you all who love Multiplayer based games try Demigod out. Make sure you play through the skirmishes and tournament single-player stuff so you get a feel for the game. I have found it quite fun and enjoyable in either online or offline modes.

Unless anything newsworthy shows tomorrow you won't see another update until Monday. Spread the word on this blog as well.

Later Gang!

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.

Demigod Servers pounded by Pirates

Stardock's Brad Wardell has sounded off in his blog on the Demigod Server issues which have plagued it since launch. Here is the poop below :)

"Today

The system works pretty well if you have a few thousand people online at once. The system works…less well if there are tens of thousands of people online at once. And if there are over 100,000 people, well, you get horrific results such as the game being incredibly unresponsive due to simple web service calls that were considered pretty benign during the beta that suddenly start to bring down firewalls and such due to the sheer massive number of calls that are being made.

Sadly, most of the ~120,000 connections are not customers but via warez. About 18,000 are legitimate. So anyway, we spent a lot of time today trying to isolate out the warez users from the legitimate users (it would require a lot of surgery to actually break them and even if we did, there’d be no friendly “ha ha pirate” message which would result in people just saying the game is buggy). Mind you, the game makes relatively few server calls, it’s just the sheer number of people.

Our stress tests had counted on having maybe 50,000 people playing at once at peak and that wouldn’t be reached for a few weeks by which time we would have slowly seen things becoming problematic. With Sins of a Solar Empire, the game was incredibly successful but its user base grew slowly and steadily over time. Sometimes on a peak time the server would start to get slow and we would adjust so that it would be better next time.

But here, when you’re getting that many connections at once, you’re no longer talking about dealing with the basics like having a good SAN and lots of redundant servers. You instead fall into all kinds of weird secondary issues that start to pop up like yesterday’s case where an older network card couldn’t handle all the packets (not bandwidth limited but # of tiny packets being sent out at once).

So during the day today, people couldn’t even logon and in some cases, the Demigod forums, which use one of the affected databases for some piddly thing were even down. Even getting the game running was a pain today because a simple HTTP call to see what the latest version would get hung leaving people looking at a black screen. Stuff of nightmares.

Before the game shipped, I wrote a scary email to our team saying how disastrous things would be and predicted doom for us and GPG if there were problems with multiplayer. At the time, my worry was about things like disconnects and CVP. It didn’t occur to me that we’d have near MMO user connections to throw in."

My Opinion:
I applaud Stardock for not putting DRM on Demigod but this was certainly unavoidable. CD-Key verifications pounding a server continously can bring any server to it's knees if the load is large enough. I feel for the legit customers who were trying to enjoy playing the multiplayer game part but hopefully the folks at Stardock & GPG can get this all sorted out soon. Another Patch will be released soon as well.