Quoting Frogboy, reply 15Let me ask those who think we should get a 2 or whatever this:
The Gamespot review will live on forever. But the problems connecting in multiplayer will likely be gone in another few days. And, I should point out that a lot of the problems people are experiencing are due to having so many more users on day 1 than we had expected.
If we had, for instance, sent out review copies of Demigod say tomorrow, we would likely end up with a very different score.
So I ask you, do you really think that's a fair review?
Yes, I believe it's a fair review. It's accurate on the date we posted it and it's based on the same version of the game that people are paying money for right now. You might not be aware of this, but we actually implemented an "After the Fact" feature that we use to update reviews as games are being improved (or in some cases, finished) after they arrive in stores. If and when Demigod's current problems get fixed, we'll be sure to add an update to the top of the review stating that, thus giving potential buyers an opportunity to make their decision based on info that's as up-to-date as we can make it.
Oh, and @gaping_maw, you're absolutely right, doing this doesn't get us a lot of "clicks" - but we do it anyway.
Justin Calvert, Section Editor, GameSpot Reviews
Ok, let's put some perspective here:
When Sins of a Solar Empire launched (Gamespot score: 9.0), the multiplayer services of the game consisted of a single EXE (Ironclad Online) running from the Startup folder of ONE machine.
However, unlike with Demigod, Sins didn't instantly have 140,000 bumping into it. Instead, it had a few thousand. Over time, as the userbase grew, Ironclad continued to improve it and we were able to provide more infrastructure.
But with Demigod, the game's street date (18 hours ago now) was broken and while only a few thousand legitimate copies got out there, it turned out to be a favorite of pirates resulting in 120,000 (yesterday) connections at its peak.
Visit: http://store.steampowered.com/stats/ and click on View Steam players per game to get a comparison. That means in a 24 hour period, our servers had to deal with more users than all the Counter-Strike servers combined had to deal with. Our system wasn't set up to handle 140,000 users. It was setup to handle a fraction of that.
Now, this isn't something that we can't address. We can slowly eliminate the pirates from using the resources but we have to do updates to do that and we have to make our NAT connector not so dependent on those resources. But it's not something we can do overnight, it may actually take a full 24 hours from the official street date to address.
At the end of the day, your position simply makes the case that it was a mistake to send Gamespot a review copy early. If we had sent out the game on release day via 2 day Fed Ex, you would have gotten it tomorrow and all the connectivity stuff would have been largely contained.
One can only imagine what the fate of Sins of a Solar Empire would have been IF its launch day resulted with tens of thousands of users connecting at once rather than a few hundred at once and the review was a snapshot of that moment.
