Stardock’s Brad Wardell is happy to acknowledge that Gas Powered Games’ Demigod has reached #3 according to NPD, which only includes boxed sale figures.
Wardell admits the game is ”heavily pirated” and it annoys him. Now with server fixes in place for the game those playing illegally should ”either buy it or accept that you’re a thief”.
”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?” mused Wardell in a post on the Sins of a Solar Empire forum.
”I know what my answer to that would be. I would say that Stardock couldn’t blame poor sales on piracy but rather the fact that the game’s built-in multiplayer match-making was totally broken for the first day of release due to its underestimation of network resources that a mainstream game would take and even when that got addressed, the multiplayer match-making for two weeks and counting has been incredibly flakey which affected reviews and word of mouth. That’s what I would say.” Smart man that Wardell guy.
Released NPD figures show that Demigod has performed darn well considering all the woe they’ve had with multiplayer. Still those calculations on the PC chart don’t include sales of digital copies sold to gamers through Stardock’s Impulse.
”But… but… what about those hundreds of thousands of pirates? Yep. Demigod is heavily pirated. And make no mistake, piracy pisses me off,” he continued.
”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.”
”My job, as CEO of Stardock, is not to fight worldwide piracy no matter how much it aggravates me personally. 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.”
Wardell concludes with his final thought: ”When the focus of energy is put on customers rather than fighting pirates, you end up with more sales. It seems common sense to me but then again, I’m just an engineer.” A DRM hating engineer - that equals sales.
Source: 1UP
