No excuese

Ars Technica had a good article that describes what happened.  But still, a lot of people seem to think warez users are able to play multiplayer games. No, they can’t.  Even the retail box has a serial # in it that users have to use and be validated to play online.  What brought down servers was a lot more benign than that.  It was the HTTPS requests to inform users if there was a new version along with checking the community features for info (friends lists, chat channels, etc.) and things like that.  Things like that are pretty piddly. It’s only when you get a ton of users doing that at the same time that it becomes a problem as we saw.

But here’s the thing: While piracy is annoying, you can’t blame piracy for this problem. Let’s face it, there’s plenty of data out there about how many pirated games are being played. We should have looked at that.  We assumed since Sins of a Solar Empire and Galactic Civilizations, both of which sold extremely well and got great reviews, that the # of pirated copies of Demigod in use would probably be in the same ballpark, maybe twice as much.  But had we looked at what other publishers have said, we would have known that it’s not unusual for there to be hundreds of thousands of warez copies in use. And if we had, we could have simply had the retail version not have any HTTP calls in it and instead just had an update button on the main menu to check for updates and voila, problem solved.

The second misconception is the argument that because Demigod’s retail version is heavily pirated that it costs massive sales. But that, again, puts the blame on the wrong parties.  If you want to talk about the horrible multiplayer experience on launch day, well, that’s our fault because of what I said above.  If you want to say that the horrible day 1 multiplayer experience resulted in negative game reviews which will seriously damage the game’s sales then I say again, that’s our fault too because of what I said above OR we could have just sent out the review copies on release day (Tuesday) and reviewers wouldn’t have had it until Thursday by which point the problem had largely been resolved and the review scores would have been fine. But in either case, it’s still our fault.