Stardock: Our customers make the rules, not the pirates

Demigod developer Stardock has stated that the huge piracy rates suffered by its recent PC release Demigod will not result in the studio implementing copy protection DRM.

If I wrote a post saying that Demigod sales were far below what we had hoped for and I said that the reason was due to piracy and that the answer was that we should have put some nasty copy protection on those DVDs to have prevented early piracy what do you think people would say?” Wardell wrote on the Sins of a Solar Empire forum.

The reason why we don’t put copy protection on our games isn’t because we’re nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don’t like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don’t count.”

The statement comes after Demigod debuted in third spot in the US PC charts – a position that does not take into account its plentiful digital sales.

My job, as CEO of Stardock, is not to fight worldwide piracy no matter how much it aggravates me personally,” he continued. My job is to maximize the sales of my product and service and I do that by focusing on the people who pay my salary – our customers.”

However, Wardell did find a moment to address the thousands who have pirated his studio’s game, touching on the (frankly, ludicrous) argument that you’ll often see in MCV comments – that if studios want to reduce piracy they should make games ‘better’ and should ‘stop ripping off’ customers.

Demigod is heavily pirated,” Wardell explained. And make no mistake, piracy pisses me off. If you’re playing a pirated copy right now, if you’re one of those people on Hamachi or GameRanger playing a pirated copy and have been for more than a few days, then you should either buy it or accept that you’re a thief and quit rationalizing it any other way.”