Demigod: So What The Hell Happened?

Stardock’s Brad Wardell has posted an in-depth explanation about what went wrong during Demigod’s launch week, for those of you interested in hearing about behind-the-scenes technical issues.

Demigod, a high profile, AAA action-strategy-role playing game was released on April 14th. Well, it was supposed to be released on April 14th but actually got released at Gamestop stores early due to a.miscommunication between their corporate HQ and their brick and mortar outlets. This wouldn’t normally have been that big of a deal except this happened to be over Easter weekend and the release servers for the game weren’t yet up. Moreover, it also caused the (warez) version (i.e. there’s no copy protection on the game so the warez version meant someone bravely zipping it up and putting it up on a torrent) resulting in over 100,000 people using it at once before we were even back from Easter break. Suffice to say, it wasn’t a pretty picture.

For the first few days, we struggled to migrate people to a different set of servers that only legitimate users had access to. This took about 48 hours. But during this brief window, the game was basically unplayable because you couldn’t even get online at all. We got whacked with some pretty negative first week reviews not surprisingly.

But our woes weren’t over yet. It became pretty clear that the NAT servers (the servers that negotiate the connection between player A and player B couldn’t handle the # of users on the game resulting in a horrible online experience. As other people have pointed out, this sort of thing isn’t unique to Demigod (i.e. plenty of other games have had rough online launches) but the big difference is that those other games had a lot more single player content whereas Demigod relies more on its multiplayer experience than most games so it was a much bigger problem.