The true effect of piracy

For those of you that say piracy isnt a problem for pc games....

Via bigdownloads:

A few days ago, when it was revealed that Gamestop had broken the sales embargo for Demigod, Stardock's CEO Brad Wardell said this would be a interesting way to see the true effects of PC piracy. In his latest update on the status of their just released strategy game, Wardell states that users with warez copies of Demigod are overloading the game's multiplayer servers.

He states, "Sadly, most of the ~120,000 connections are not customers but via warez. About 18,000 are legitimate." Those warez users are being pushed off so that they are not " . . . slamming the same servers that legitimate customers are using." Server capacity has also been expanded and a new connection system for multiplayer matches (shown above) has been created that will be released later via a patch.

Wardell also took time to go after GameSpot's 6.5 (out of 10) review of Demigod. The review was critical of the game's current connection issues and while Wardell certainly has to agree he adds, " . . . I think that should be weighted with what the average user who gets Demigod will experience and in reality, as annoying as this issue is, it's not something that's going to be an ongoing issue, it's something that is likely to be taken care of in the next day or two." Wardell hopes other reviews of the game will take that into consideration before posting up their opinions.

Update: A new patch that is designed to fix some of the connection issues has been released for the game via Impulse. Another patch is expected in a few more days.