Demigod Gets Hit By Piracy, Hard News

The 'Day 1 Status Report' over on Demigod's official site has revealed some troubling figures that show just how hard PC developers are hit by piracy in the current gaming climate.

According to publisher Stardock, of around 120,000 users that logged onto Demigod's online component after its US release on Tuesday, only 18,000 of them were legitimate users that had purchased a copy of the game.

What's more is that this influx of illegal users then causes online problems with the game, as the status report explains:

"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 by which time we would have slowly seen things becoming problematic."

"If there are over 100,000 people," the report continues, "you get horrific results such as the game being incredibly unresponsive due to simple web service calls that were considered pretty benign during the beta that suddenly start to bring down firewalls and such due to the sheer massive number of calls that are being made."

The situation sounds pretty dire and neither Stardock nor Gas Powered Games are at fault by the sounds of things. Let's just hope European consumers do a much better job of actually buying the game when it's released over here on May 15th.