Most gamers respect Stardock for its firm anti-DRM (Digital Rights Management) stance. Sadly, this stance may have bit them in the back with the release of their latest Action-RTS hybrid title, Demigod.
On its first day in the market, more than 120,000 users tried to connect to Demigod's servers to play online. Problem is, only 18,000 of those were legitimate users.
The system works pretty well if you have a few thousand people online at once," Stardock CEO Brad Wardell explained on his personal blog. "The system works...less well if there are tens of thousands of people online at once. And if there are over 100,000 people, well, 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."
"So during the day today, people couldn't even logon and in some cases, the Demigod forums, which use one of the affected databases for some piddly thing were even down. Even getting the game running was a pain today because a simple HTTP call to see what the latest version would get hung leaving people looking at a black screen. Stuff of nightmares."
Demigod development team has been working around the clock to resolve the issue, and they finally managed to contain the situation within a day of the outbreak.
