Now hold on here.  Are you changing your argument now?  You never mentioned that before, in fact, you said the exact opposite.

"The game is ALREADY PIRATED and ALREADY PLAYED multiplayer over programs that enable pirates to play it, don't believe it ask brad himself.  I'm telling you that your argument is irrational - i.e. the pirates are already playing the game for free over other game services.  And according to stardocks stats, multiplayer users are a small minority of demigod purchasers, so 80%+ of their customers buy it for singleplayer only, so the reasoning for not allowing unofficial versions to grow the community of players is mindboggling weak from a rational, evidence based perspective.  Everyone would have more people to play with IMHO, and that is good customer service to those who paid but have to wait too long to get a game going."

Contrast that with your paragraph in your first post stating

"For a game like demigod IMHO, you should be doing the OPPOSITE of what everyone in the industry is doing and take us back to the sane times pre 1997/98 where people could play "pirated" versions with one another because they wanted to use one copy, mirror it and play with their friends." Which implies online play is indeed not allowed or possible.

Again, regardless of whatever your argument is, there is still no valid position for allowing pirated versions of the game online.  It doesnt matter that only 23% TRIED to play online,  it only matters that those 23% represent 23% of their entire possible market and profits, and to remove the need and possibility to tap that market would result in a much lower overhead for the company.  If the game could be easily pirated for online play, there would be no incentive to go out and actually purchase the game.  This would result in a much larger user base for sure, yet this userbase would not be filled with users the company cares about.

Now, about your conception of what customer service is:  There is no such thing as customer service in the form of ensuring a large player base.  I dont know what you could even call that, but I know that no companies actually work towards this goal if it is based upon only adding free users which give nothing back to the company.  I would also like to note that this game has relatively short waiting times to join a game.  Sure there arent many people on at a time, but because of the rather narrow scope of the game there is not a big section of games to choose from so the chances are if there are three games open, at least one will be centered around what you want to play.  I know successful games which have longer (up to 10 minute wait times between games) wait times, and those games only last 15 minutes at the longest.

The simple truth is that the majority of players are willing to wait extended periods of time between playing in order to enjoy a game they are playing.  There is no need to let everyone play for free just to keep a tiny audience happy, when you can have a small semi-happy audience in the same situation.

Hopefully Ive made myself clear here, but it is new years and Ive been out.. its 4 am. Peace. (I spent much more than I paid for this game tonight, in reference to you calling the company greedy for charging $40 for this product, which was another argument I was making two posts ago)

Alright.  Pirates are playing the game.  So you are saying since the game is already pirated, just let the people who play through other means log into impulse and get access to updates and play with the paying crowd.  Im going to repeat a lot of what Ive already said, but Ill word it differently this time and put it in a pretty numbered list for you.

The positive effects of this:

1. larger player base, which means less waiting time for people who paid.

2. A potential for higher future profits, players may play the game for free and like it a lot, and be more likely to buy future games.

The negatives:

1. The larger player base is not supporting the company.  They just downloaded the game for free.  Chances are many players who might have paid have now just downloaded it.

2. Less people will purchase the game.  I mean, it is free right? Just download and crack it. see above

3. Higher maintenance costs to run the game and affiliated websites. Higher traffic means higher server costs.

So, comparing the positives and negatives we get this.  It will create a bigger userbase, which will keep the people who already bought the game happier.  This targetted audience intended to be made happier shrinks, meaning that through the means they intended to keep people happy, they have cut off a portion of their income.  Not only have they cut off part of their income, they have done so at the same time as incurring higher costs to run the game.  All of this is to be risked on the limited potential of future profits for the company.  The problem, however, is that in order to actually obtain these potential profits means they will need to enforce the DRM again and not allow pirated versions to play through official servers.  If people can get something for free, they dont pay unless they have spare money.  You see, we are back at step one again, with a DRM enabled and no pirated versions.  And I can guarantee you if a company began with "freeware" and switched to adding a DRM on their next updates, people like you would be calling them greedy again.

Why go through all that hassle when you can have a guaranteed profit NOW, with the accompanying likely situation that if your game is produced well enough (like demigod is, arguably) you will also be likely to transfer customers to future games regardless of issues about "long" wait times.

There are certain things that you need to keep in mind when you think about a topic like this.  You can not take the perspective of a lowly player.  You must take the perspective of the company producing the game.  Making a game is purely about profits, and I cant see a valid argument for allowing pirated versions online.  Sure pirated versions can get online now, but there is no official way for them to do so.  Their online play is greatly limited.

Now, you say waiting over 10 minutes is bad all around, I dont understand that.  How does "bad for me" translate to "bad all around?"  I have only played about 30 games online, but I have never had to wait an amount of time I considered too long before.  No game is perfect, and there is no point trying to force a game to be perfect for everyone.  But this little comment is irrelevent anyway, it is too much of a personal opinion and not objective.

No...The reason Demigod has a low number account is because:
A) Its similar to DotA so you would expect a large amount of people from DotA to come over. However, it was so different from it hardly any of them liked it and so there was no migration from the "Moba" genre to Demigod which usually happens with other games.

This games really, really felt like it wasnt made for online play. I mean - no chat lobby? (Im sorry I dont count a cheap overlay that hardly anyone uses as a real "chat lobby"), Poor Connectivity? (Its fine now but for the first 3 months it sucked the ass), Laggy games? (im sorry but lag-free games on Demigod are RARE. Say what you want about the reasons but the fact is no other games lag like this ingame. And its made even worst that when one player lags, EVERYONE experiences it. In other games this doesnt happen). No clan system? Broken/bad friends system? No groups problem? A.I in matchmaking mode....wow

Gameplay is awesome though everything else caused it to fail.

@DalZK

From Joystick.com

"Demigod appears to have been a pirates' cove at launch, as Stardock CEO Brad Wardell explained on his blog a couple days ago: Out of the 120,000 connections on launch day, only 18,000 were legitimate customers (that's not sales, merely "concurrent users"). Obviously, this situation put quite a strain on the servers. He explained that Stardock stress tested for 50,000 players at peak times and wasn't expecting to hit those numbers for weeks.

A letter from Stardock this morning notes that "most" launch day issues were resolved yesterday afternoon. A "doppleganger" of the network was created, along with an update for legitimate players, which now directs them to the clean servers. It's a pretty nasty situation for Stardock, which has actually put faith in gamers by not placing copy protection on its games. "

That's 80,000 more players, that's SIGNIFICANT IMHO, imagine if stardock accepted these people playing the game from laucnh day where the community might be.

The point is we all know demigod had a troubled development and was released with a dearth of content and serious bugs, that is what really killed demigod (GPG) stardock was late to the party (and I feel kinda bad for them) since they are getting associated with GPG but GPG is the one who released an unfinished game.   Finally not enough funds to complete the game and the bone-headed multiplayer only idea with a dearth of single player content for others.  

Lots of lessons are being learned right now and I think brad is one of the few reasonable people on the game development side of things, he's not perfect but at least he's listening and that is important, we all tend to get self righteous and I think we need to just accept the real world and real people have legitimate arguments despite that the lack of  online success is mostly on the the developers and their attitude since the power is in their hands, not in the average gamers hands.  The truth is game dev's tend to be over-ambitious and over-estimate their ability to deliver.

If there is one lesson I have learned in my life, you have to go above and beyond others and not expect any reward and sometimes go against the common wisdom or morality do what is best for your customers, become more laid back and take risks everyone is afraid of taking. If that means giving 110% and in gaming, if that means allowing pirates to play with legit customers, so be it. If you want to have your products be head and shoulders better then others, even if you have to suck it up in long hours.

"People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them. " -- epictetus 

Our views, our self rigthteousness and air that we are right often blind us to new avenues of opportunity because we are afraid of embracing the world as it is, pirates exist but not all pirates are bad people who don't pay for games.  And if most gamers and developers were honest with themselves in their own lives, the would realize they were once those very same people when they were younger if they are any kind of serious gamer at all.

I discovered civilization 1 through it being shared around with other people, and I was just so enamored with it I went out and bought Civ 2, Civ 3 and Civ4 because I knew this game was great and I wanted to support more games like it in the future.  The idea that piracy is a one way street and not something more complex and hard to grasp is naive.

Modern Warfare 2 is the most pirated game probably ever, but notice it's also the game who made over a billion dollars.

Demigods low sales were due to lack of quality not pirates ram, sorry.  Those who stuck around and supported DG even though it's probably a game that deserves to fail (because lets face it, it has serious issues in serving diverse gaming community beyond the multiplayer core).

A little more time and wisdom is needed, game dev's are an ambitious bunch and development of a game does not always work out as planned, its hard and high risk, you don't blame your customers when your game doesn't sell well, you blame yourself for not knowing 1) your market 2) the limits of what you can do.

I read a lot about the industry and what goes on in it so I am well aware of why games fail, and no games do not need more DRM, the problem's with games today are overambitiousness, team sizes and asset production costs.  These are going to take a while for the industry to get down to a science.

@ramw2

Piracy is equivalent of renting the game, trying it out to see if you like it.  In console land renting games has been since there since the beginning of time, piracy is the equivalent of try before you buy, if lots of people pirate your game it does not mean they like it enough to buy it.  Notice there are other games more pirated but are financially successful, so blaming piracy is idiotic.

Like I said before, the problem is with us as human beings, we need to accept reality as it is and come up with unique perspectives and solutions and downplaying our sensibilities, and should think about the state of the experience of paying customers in the game. You cannot prohibit "Try before you buy" mentality of gamers, you should learn from history, when you try to prohibit a popular behaviour you end up looking like a fool in the end - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition 

Also read this article and you'll begin to understand why man gamers feel burned all the time when they spend money on games, fanning the flames of "try before you buy".

Article -http://hellforge.gameriot.com/blogs/Demigod/Demigod-multiplayer-finally-fixed

Quote:

Demigod multiplayer finally fixed?

When a calf is born they don't leap from the womb steady on their feet. They stumble about, fall over, get back up and then do it all over again until they figure out how to walk.

While it's incredibly vain to quote myself, this has been Demigod's story. Many already know of the premature retail release forcing Stardock employees to return to work over Easter weekend to attempt a salvage of the situation. Multiplayer connectivity was plagued by issues with pirates being unfairly blamed by popular purveyors of new media the world 'round.

It turned out there were inherent flaws in the code that facilitated multiplayer connections.  In addition to Custom Games that use the well known RTS lobby system to set up online matches, Demigod also has ranked online multiplayer called Pantheon. Pantheon requires that games be automatically created by a matchmaking system without first connecting to a lobby. There is a similar feature for unranked matches called Skirmish.

The matchmaking system was failing and even hosting normal Custom Games was problematic. Brad Wardell, being the straight shooter that he is, explained that they had licensed a third-party library called RakNet and expected to be able to treat it like you would any other engine such as Unreal or Bink. Unfortunately this backfired as RakNet posed scalability issues when dealing with the number of peer-to-peer connections Demigod required.

@ramw2

I could care less about what a bunch of greedy thugs thinks.  We have billionaires and homeless people living side by side, captialism is not a just amoral system, and anyone who thinks so needs his head read, this world is filled with assholes, that is, us, and since too many people are assholes, I could care less what one of the most greedy individiualistic, selfish,  people on the face of the earth think.

It's the people that make the world a good or bad place, not a label or abstraction.

You should go read this before making another comment:

http://baens-universe.com/articles/McCauley_copyright

"Stealing someone's hard work is not something I can or will support, and any excuses put forth to justify the theft are still merely excuses."

Your whole argument is invalid, information cannot be stolen merely copied.  See Rivalrous goods:

In economics, a good is considered either rivalrous (rival) or nonrival. Rival goods are goods whose consumption by one consumer prevents simultaneous consumption by other consumers. Most goods, both durable and nondurable, are rival goods. A hammer is a durable rival good. One person's use of the hammer presents a significant barrier to others who desire to use that hammer at the same time. However, the first user does not "use up" the hammer, meaning that some rival goods can still be shared through time. An apple is a nondurable rival good: once an apple is eaten, it is "used up" and can no longer able to be eaten by others. Non-tangible goods can also be rivalrous. Examples include the ownership of radio spectrumsand domain names. In more general terms, almost all private goods are rivalrous.

So remember its not stealing it's sharing, if it wasn't the internet people would be copying discs like they used to do.  Developers are not deprived of their software work when someone makes a copy and tries it out, no one is deprived of anything.  In fact early shareware games success were predicated on mass piracy (doom, duke 3d, etc).  A copy does not equal a lost sale.  If matter and energy could be copied just as easily, whole industries would go bust over-night and you would be the one complaining about those evil car-copying "thiefs". See Prohibition : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition

If a popular behaviour is popular with the public it is no longer legitimately "illegal" just like alcohol, you're just in denial just like the prohbitionists were.

I first want to note that I do not support PC gaming piracy, however i do not think that the reason PC games are not as popular as console games is because of DRM or piracy.  One reason for this discrepency is that even though there are many more PCs than consoles, only a small percentage of them are acually capable of playing PC games.  Far many years companies were creating games with the best graphics technology that they could, and they relied on people upgrading thier hardware often.  Although this mentality is changing now, it was too little too late.  The other main reason is advantage of having only one hardware configuration to program for as a opposed to many.  As a result of this console game just work, were with pc games many times there are issues relating to incompatability with different hardware.  Not to mention the fact that companies who make stratagy games insist on using P2P multiplay instead of client-server.  This is dispite the fact that lag and NAT connection issues are rampent on any P2P game.  I know that it is harder to cheat on a P2P game and it requires less servers, but what good is that if people do not play your game online because they do not know what port forwarding means.

"So not sure what you were trying to point out......"

McCauley:

 "I am so sensible, Sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living. If I saw, Sir, any probability that this bill could be so amended in the Committee that my objections might be removed, I would not divide the House in this stage. But I am so fully convinced that no alteration which would not seem insupportable to my honorable and learned friend, could render his measure supportable to me, that I must move, though with regret, that this bill be read a second time this day six months."

Notice that the entire world is against these copyright and propertarian monopolies, for instance gamers never OWN their games, the can't get the source code, fix them, modify them, etc, etc.  The can't create fan created derivatives http://www.opcoder.com/projects/chrono/

All because of copyright monopoly, if GPG is unwilling to fix demigod there would be other people in the community willing to do so but they are barred from doing so because of stupid ass laws like copyright and the corporate serfdom model of software ownership, that is - license, never own

You make a lot of claims without any basis in fact here though.

Demigod, LoL, and HoN were all made to generate a profit.

You assume that LoL and HoN will be more profitable than Demigod.  What is your evidence that this is the case? Do you have any third party references showing it in the top 10 best sellers (like NPD had with Demigod at retail alone for two solid months after release?).

I keep seeing people assume Demigod "failed". Based on what? Because there aren't a lot of people playing online compared to say Dota?  As a gamer, I would love to see a much larger online fan base.  But as a businessman, I am interested in how much the game makes.  Demigod has not been a failure by any measurement.

You seriously need to make the distinction between what you want to be true and what is actually true.

I don't think that is true. According to the Berne convention, the very creation of a work copyrights it.

In some countries, such as Germany, copyright can not even be transferred. Whether one can release ones work to the public domain, and abandon ones copyright is legally somewhat unclear. Which is why free programs generally still have licenses.

So yes, people are forced to copyright what they make. Well, technically at least.

If that were true, then nobody would pay for them.

Getting X hours of entertainment on-demand is obviously worth that money to enough people to keep this inudustry alive.  I purchased a copy of Demigod and I can play Demigod any time I damn well please for at least the next few years if not for the rest of my life.  That was worth $40 to me.  If it isn't to you, then you're welcome to find another way to spend your hard-earned cash. 

You know, it's easy to make these sorts of bold statements about other peoples' work but I honestly don't see where you're drawing this sense of entitlement from. 

Gamers 'deserve' the terms that they agree to when they purchase a copy of the game.  If you don't like the terms (which are relatively universal in my experience), then you have every right to not spend the money and pass on the game.  I don't know what sort of horrible dictatorship that some people are living under where they're forced to be 'abused' by private industry (as least as far as luxury goods like video games are concerned) but this certainly isn't the case anywhere that I've lived.