no 18k legit people online at a time I believe, while 100k pirates on at once.

They aren't. Whoever wrote that article didn't bother to actually read what Brad wrote.

Pre-patch day2 patch, the game made server calls on the main menu and a few other places for things like update checks. The pirate copies don't get patches, so even though our games have these checks removed, theirs don't.

The caveat is that there's no easy way to distinguish between pirate copies and legit-but-not-updated store-bought copies, so they can't just pull the plug on those servers. Instead, we got our own and they've kept the "beta" servers active for the non-updated games.

The pirated copies can not get patches or play anything other than LAN/Hamachi and SP.

Kotaku got it wrong. Brad was talking about SIMULATENEOUS connections. Thats 18,000 legit customers trying to connect at the same time and not 18,000 sales. However it certainly shows, and possibly due to the lack of a demo, that the warez copies of the game got a lot of attention.

If you can't determine who's pirate and who's store-bought-unpatched, how do you know there were 18k legit and 100k bullshit connections? Sorry, just need it explained cause I don't get it.

What does that have to do with simultaneous connections?

Well, I am not sure if Gamestop really increased the problem of piracy. Normally, games don't need to be in the store to get pirated- look at all the games that ended up on torrents because plantworkers leaked them etc.

Its very well explained in the Demigod: Day 2 Status Report! thread, i can't understand how there is so much confusion in this thread.

Read more assume less, you ppl don't even read each other posts right.

It was loading impulse friends list and such and checking things right when you loaded the game.

While yeah it sucks that people pirate, it really wasn't the pirates fault.. IT shouldn't of been calling the servers untill people tried to log in.  Then unregistered and priates woudln't of mattered. Pirates would just have tried multiplayer once, saw it doesn't work with a pirated copy, and not try again.

I'm not sure why anyone calls it a leak when it was most likely a normal retail buyer who put it up on the pirate networks.

20K sales in the 1st week isn't bad though is it?   I mean I know more people that have purchased demigod than I do any other recent PC game release (that isn't saying that much, since there haven't been many other big titles, but still)

Can't you see who is a pirate and who isn't by the serial number? When I bought the game I had to put in a serial number to register it, how did the pirates do this?

Yeah, really. This is absolutely possible.

Another thing that these articles do not mention is how often even DRM-heavy games are pirated. Most evidence shows that DRM does little in the long run to disuade pirates (as it only takes one to find a flaw in the system and to exploit it), though it hurts legitimate customers greatly.

In fact, most PC titles have a pirating rate near or greatly exceeding 50% anyway. For example, depsite its extremely draconian SecurROM DRM, Spore had 2 million legitimate buyers at the end of 2008, whereas it downloaded illegaly 1.7 million times (http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=203383). Obviously, its DRM did little to discourage pirating, though it did encourage users to develop pirating skills (http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/features/spores-drm-trained-legions-of-pirates-says-halpin/?biz=1). To this end, EA has released a tool that would disactivate SecurROM DRM for its games (http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/31/1917254&from=rss).

On the other hand, World of Goo showed us that releasing a game with no DRM yields the same rates of pirating as those released with DRM (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21123). At least in this case effort was saved on the programmers' part with having to impliment a DRM, and legitimate buyers of the game (such as myself) were not punished for being honest and fair.

Now Spore's 46% rate of piracy hardly compares to an 85% rate of pirating, but I personally don't believe that that many users have pirated Demigod, and there is something wrong with the statistic if it is only taken from server request data.

lol argue against DRM all you want, but like it or not it's a necessary evil...