Demigod savaged by piracy

A rush of 120,000 users heading online to play Demigod should be good news for Stardock’s MMO Demigod, despite the resulting server woes – but when 102,000 of those users are playing a pirated copy of the game, it becomes a major concern.

Speaking on the official Demigod site, the title’s developers have at times seen as many as 50,000 people simultaneously trying to log on to the game. In total, some 120,000 connections have been made.

Normally this would be good news, but the dev adds that sales of the game to date have reached around 18,000 – suggesting that the number of pirated users outnumbers legitimate purchasers by around 6:1.

Sadly, most of the 120,000 connections are not customers but via warez,” the blog reads. About 18,000 are legitimate.

So we spent a lot of time today trying to isolate out the warez users from the legitimate users (it would require a lot of surgery to actually break them and even if we did, there’d be no friendly ‘ha ha pirate’ message which would result in people just saying the game is buggy).”