James Delahunty
18 Apr 2009 19:47
Despite gaining a good reputation for an anti-DRM stance and a "just ignore it" attitude to piracy, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell has experienced first hand what piracy can mean for your games. He had said that pirates will do what they will do, and should be ignored, but DRM should not be used as it punishes the legitimate customer. However, with the launch of Demigod, piracy showed how it can have adverse effects on game titles.
Firstly, there was a major problem with online play, as the servers were overwhelmed with 120,000 connections to deal with, well beyond the number that had been anticipated in advance. Of the 120,000 connections, about 18,000 were from validated users. As you may have guessed, the system quickly went down, which disrupted gameplay for legitimate customers.
To make matters worse, the problems occurred as reviewers were assessing the new title, and was marked as a reason for GameSpot's 6.5 rating. "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... So during the day today, people couldn't even log on, and in some cases, the Demigod forums, which use one of the affected databases for some piddly thing were even down," Wardell wrote.
He continued: "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." He reflected on an e-mail he had sent to staff predicting how disastrous things could be if there were problems with multiplayer.