Stardock swings at Microsoft while Demigod continues to burn |
|
| BY Emmanuel Petti Jun. 17th, 2009 | More on: |
Demigod has been out for couple months now and not without a fair share of problems. After the initial release the game was met with massive online stability issues thanks to the insane percentage of people who pirated it. Apparently out of the 140,000 users only 18,000 were actually legit. But it turns out piracy was just a temporary issue when it came to Demigod’s problems — the game has suffered from a variety of online related issues which were a result of poorly tested net code. To their credit, they re-wrote the entire net code to address the more problematic issues, but some headaches still remain.
Stardock’s own Brad Wardell expressed his frustrations on the Demigod forums: “The game deserves a bad rep IMO. My frustration is too great for words with some of the stuff I’ve seen… I know it’s a lot lot LOT better now. But still, I just played a pantheon game tonight and first, it took like 3 or 4 minutes to find a game, then one of the players got dropped so I ended up in a 2 on 1 match. It’s just ridiculously frustrating.”
Not to be deterred by the smoldering remains of their own game, Stardock found time to make an ironic criticizm about Windows Vista and how gamers should upgrade to Windows 7 asap. Gamasutra talked with Wardell where he critizied Microsoft for releasing Vista too early before drivers were ready and before performance issues could be addressed. Releasing a product too early, boy that sounds familiar. Unfortunately for gamers Windows 7 isn’t officially out yet so upgrading asap is going to have to wait until October.
June 17th, 2009
at 4:54 pm
Thanks for the link/trackback (to my blog at Hellforge).
Demigod’s online stability issues wasn’t the fault of pirates. The pirates caused Stardock maybe a few days to a week’s headache and that because of a silly web service call that should have been removed before the game went gold.
In my same blog at Hellforge I deal with the topic exhaustively and also talk about how Stardock has now largely (and finally) fixed Demigod’s Internet connectivity issues.
Demigod is also not close to being ’smoldering remains.’ Not yet. If Stardock and Gas Powered Games play their cards right the game could grow into something truly remarkable.
This has nothing to do with Wardell’s uneccesarily scathing Vista, though. Just nitpicking your coverage of Demigod.
June 17th, 2009
at 4:55 pm
Excuse the misplaced apostrophe above (and the double post). Thanks.
June 17th, 2009
at 7:42 pm
No problem, and just to clarify. The post is more about the ironic statement passed by Brad Wardell about Vista releasing too thus giving gamers a buggy poor performing game. The first paragraph was explaining the situation with Demigod we have neglected to cover thus far. (Mostly my fault since I’m one of the few PC guru’s over here) We had to bring the reader up to speed before pointing out that Wardell’s criticisms against Vista are kind of like the pot calling the kettle black.