Wardell: Demigod Burdened By More Than 100,000 Pirates

Stardock says Gas Powered Games' recently-launched Demigod is struggling severely under the burden of hundreds of thousands of illegitimate users on its online servers. That's according to a blog post from Stardock CEO Brad Wardell, who says it's been "a pain" to get the game running, and that a flood of over 120,000 users is yielding "horrific results." "Sadly, most of the ~120,000 connections are not customers but via warez," writes Wardell. "About 18,000 are legitimate." "Our stress tests had counted on having maybe 50,000 people playing at once at peak and that wouldn’t be reached for a few weeks," he adds, "by which time we would have slowly seen things becoming problematic." Demigod's release has already been beleaguered by a broken street date. Wardell recently told Gamasutra that Stardock is in talks with retailer GameStop to find out how the early release slip-up happened -- and resulted in support staff having to work Easter weekend to configure the servers. At the time Wardell also told us that the broken street date "maximized" the opportunity for piracy. In the recent blog post Wardell now says the team is "trying to isolate out the warez users from the legitimate users" in order to cope.