Stardock CEO Brad Wardell has done a video for IGN explaining how he plans on fixing the network issues that have made Demigod’s launch a lot less smooth than it should have been.
[url=http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3173758]In a comment to 1up’s Scott Sharkey[/url], Wardell says that the game, sold early by Gamestop, has also seen a lot of piracy, meaning the servers were clobbered a lot more heavily than he had anticipated. So the studio that is strongly against DRM has seen one of its major published titles hobbled by the lack of DRM.
“So the studio that is strongly against DRM has seen one of its major published titles hobbled by the lack of DRM.”
That statement is only true if DRM somehow slows piracy and if the publisher does not lose customers by using DRM.
I don’t remember Brad Wradell saying that piracy would not hurt the company. His argument was that it does no good fighting it with digital rights management .
On the other hand, impulse/goo is a form digital rights management too of course.
Regarding the Demigod release: PC Games are sold more as a service these days and not as products. The press should stop adding numbers to reviews. Review scores have never been anything but misleading for consumers, but when the game is a service, the earliest moment you can fully review it is when the service ends.
I thought that gamespot review was quite accurate. It can be updated later when the issues are fixed. It’s just the score that will be invalid in a few days. That score is everything most people base they decision on.
What I as a consumer would really like to see from Game Magazines: Game reviews containing a link to Publisher/Developer Profiles, where anyone could see how the Consumer was treated in the recent past. How many updates, what free/paid content etc. That’s as important to the consumer as what is in the game at release.
And, by all means, get rid of the scores.
“So the studio that is strongly against DRM has seen one of its major published titles hobbled by the lack of DRM.”
This also presupposed that the amount of piracy due to the lack of DRM is significantly more than if DRM were in place. Given that the average time-to-crack of a major release is under 12 hours, I’m not sure how much effect DRM would have.
I don’t know the details of why pirated copies could be overloading the servers, but a simple “one connection per cd key” system should resolve that, no DRM required.
Just as interesting is the fact that Gamespot gave such a bad review score for the ‘day 0’ issues – compare this to the minimal hit that the Empire Total War score got for it’s own, arguably just as bad, day 0 issues.
And maybe most telling of all is the publisher reaction – compare Creative Assembly’s “there’s no problem here, and Tom Chick doesn’t exist” approach to Stardock’s “sorry, and we won’t sleep till we get this fixed” approach.
Sigh.
A third thing to consider is that part of the “No DRM” policy is providing incentive to buy the game for the additional content and maintenance/upgrades that go on after the release. If the pirated copy hooks someone to the point that they end up buying the game because of the neato bell or whistle in the 2d content release, that effectively replaces a pirated copy with a sale.
What, people still pay attention to Gamespot?
Yes they do:
http://www.google.com/search?q=game+review