HAHAHAH

GPG Gave us TWO Demigods FOR FREE. That is $200.000. Yeah...

League of Legends COPIED DOTA then cashed in. 

I thought Stardock paid GPG for those two demigods.

And since the lead developers of DoTA now created LoL you can't accuse them of copying.

However, lifekatana accidently revealed why DG won't stand a chance to LoL, a fact that GPG probably realized: A Demigod costs them $100.000.

I suspect a new LoL champion is substantially cheaper (well, they are also of considerably lower quality in every way, but as long as they sell ...).
Even if GPG would switch their sales model to the free-to-play-plus-shop model LoL embraces, they'd never be able to churn out demigods as fast as LoL can do champions.

And since Stardock messed up the initial release, there's no large enough customer base to make further support feasible.

I agree with topic author.
I play League of Legends more often, because of better game support. When bug is found, Riot repairs it as fast it is possible, and releases new champions often. I know, LoL isnt full game like Demigod, but i would be more happier when u repair disconnects and crashes instead of adding Demigods.

Is it just me or would you guys like to trade the $100,000.00 Rocket Cow and the $100,000.00 Just Another Squishy Assassin for a genuine effort to fix the balance issues and the bug issues?  So much time and effort... yet had a fraction of that time and money been used to even up the items and skills of the original DGs, it would have given the game 100X the variety that DA and OC brought.  

Can't wait for SC2 to come out... and I'm talking about the Blizzard game, not the game that was just developed by a company that has to be begged/threatened/blackmailed/bribed by their publishers to give half-assed support their product.

yea i love rocket cow

well... that's not entirely true.  It seem like us old school fellows are all chiming in, so why not.  Stardock has messed PLENTY up with Demigod and public relations.  We've generally been put in the category of hardcore DG players (read:  players of DG that haven't quit due to techincal difficulties). 

I'll just tackle 1 single point.  SD handles QA for the GPG patches of DG.  SD's QA team doesn't really do much QA.  That may offend some at SD.  Perhaps, after release, their QA was just making sure that patches would go live at the expected time, but if there was any build testing, it was pretty weak. I can get as specific as needed if there's any disagreement.  But let's be quite clear - on the QA piece, all SD had to do was go back to GPG and say, "the build you gave us (1.20.147) on impulse that reported "Oculus: Brain Storm clears negative effects."  does not work.  Please fix this."  They didn't even do that as made clear by their current release.  And how long would that single item of the changelog from 1.20.147 take to test?  2 minutes. Tested by me.  I can even post this now and they won't/or can't get GPG to release a free update so that the changelog is correct.  Why?   Maybe because they had their opportunity for a free fix when they were supposed to do QA... maybe not.  Why exactly couldn't someone from QA take the 2 minutes needed to make sure that item worked?  Why couldn't someone from QA take the 2 hours needed to ensure that EVERYTHING in the changelog for 1.20.147 worked?  Because.... demigod must not be a priority.  And that, my hardcore demigod fans, is a true and realistic statement.  SD and GPG both run businesses and it frankly isn't worth it to them at this point to add new content, fix a minutia of bugs, etc.  I love the game and I'll keep playing for some time. I'm grateful that GPG chose to make this new IP.  It has been one of the best games I have played in my entire life.  Its also been the worst game I've played, but only due to techincal issues.

I even bought Supcom2, but I bit my fucking lip while I did it.  I'm actually upset a bit that I bought from GPG again.  Demigod has left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth for both GPG and SD.

How much money would it cost SD to incorporate the bugfixes (that's right - BUG-fixes) found by the community as added in the uberfix mod into the actual game?  I'm guessing too much is the thought.  And maybe they are right...

BUT - all that negative aside.  The CEO of SD did step in and play the crap out of the game and even drove several enhancements that we all appreicate.  The easiest to mention is changing the gold value for AI down to low and setting HP to high.  Granted, the real reason for that being great is because people often crash or disconnect when playing demigod, but its a great (probably the best) enhancement we ever received to DG (imo).  We've even got modding now so that we can fix the problems and add new some new content (no maps, but much better than nothing.  MUCH!).  And that's because someone at SD chose to get involved and make DG better. Brad took the time and a game we love is all the better for it.  It'd be great if he took the time again and lobbied for us, but to be honest, it doesn't make much fiscal sense to do that.  I wish demigod was called galciv 2 somedays though.

Who handled QA for the GPG patches to Demigod?  If there was a problem, it was SD's responsibility to request a new build.  That's the system those 2 companies setup.

edit - if i tell you I will check your work and don't, is it your fault?

Also I'm really fing pissy because I'm working at 4am here for my job...

I'm sorry to hear you say thgat Orlean. I know you were one of the people looking forward to release back in the beta. 

And I never got to play with you

Okay guys, I have to interject here.

How many times in the history of game publishing has the PUBLISHER been responsible to provide/handle the netcode?  It never ceases to amaze me that people don't ask this question.

I am not at liberty to go into details but you have no idea how insulting it is for someone to lay the full responsibility of netcode issues in Demigod on Stardock.

We get the blame because WE (Stardock) stepped up to try to solve a problem that was not of our own making.  Every time you see someone say "Stardock should have done this" bear in mind that Stardock is the North American publisher and ESD distributor of Demigod. Atari is the one with worldwide retail distribution and GPG is the developer.  We saw problems and we stepped in to try to help. You don't want to know what the alternative would have been.

I point this out because it gets very old, after everything we did to try to help Demigod and the community to have people blame us for every perceived issue they encounter simply because we stepped in to help.  It's like blaming the fire department for the fire.

Stardock spent more on Demigod's post-release support than it spent on the ENTIRE budget of Galactic Civilizations II (both initial development and post release support).  

Of course I noticed. And again you guys make so many assumptions that you have no idea how frustrating it is to sit back and not comment on some of this stuff.  If you think our QA didn't report these kinds of things you're mistaken. 

It's a case of being stuck between a rock and a hard place.  How many times would I post "Patch this week" only to have BBQ'd when it didn't come out on time? And why was that? Because QA would find something that should take seconds to fix in LUA and assume that the next build would fix it.  Then the build would come in and it would still be broken and eventually we'd just have so much pressure to release it by the community that we would do so.

*I* was the one who asked for the cleanse feature for Oculus's mana restore ability.  So you can be damn sure that I was painfully aware that it didn't remove the debuffs.  How many times did we delay the release of Oculus (and each time having the fans screaming for blood)? Eventually you just have to release the thing.  It's March and it still hasn't be officially fixed.

I want to be clear, GPG is a good company. They're my friends. And I think they did the best they could with Demigod under the circumstances they were operating under.  And I'm glad, that despite Demigod's technical challenges, that the game has done pretty well.  But fundamentally, our business models aren't terribly compatible.  

Our model is to release a title and generate revenue from it over a long period of time through free updates.  GPG has the more traditional model of a AAA game studio where their income is generated via publisher advances on new titles.  That's why GPG went on to SupCom2 and why they're pushing Kings and Castles so hard right now (they are looking for publishers to pay for its development). 

I am hoping that GPG will release more updates to Demigod. And I will be lobbying them to let us include fan made updates with the game.  

Demigod's support isn't at an end. There WILL be more Demigod updates. I promise you that even if I have to do LUA updates myself.

To be honest Frogboy, Stardock has Impulse and GPG does not. So I suppose its much easier for Stardock to update games. Not only does Stardock have Impulse, but you guys have a huge ObjectDesktop section and your programs ship on retail computers. So I can understand why you can produce more updates than GPG can.

I still really felt the GPG/Stardock team worked well. I think you should do it again. Hell if I know if SupCom2 will ever get patches. Squeenix is a terrible publisher.

I appreciated the development Demigod had over the summer, but unfortunately Demigod's development story is a sad one, and didn't receive the full GPG treatment it deserved. It saddens me GPG can churn out SupCom2 with 20 maps, a full campaign, and 3 factions and Demigod shipped with 8 maps and 8 Demigods.

So... Demigod 2!

Another thing that seems to be forgotten here, is just how much the community knows.

Much of the interaction between SD & GPG is information that is not available to us. This is good thing.

The analogy is often made that you "never want to know what goes in a sausage", it is actually worse than that. Consider how many people eat hamburgers, but are yet disgusted by the idea that someone kills a cow to do it.

Letting the public know about the interactions between two divisions of a company, let alone the interactions between two companies is a recipe for disaster. The community (you can generalize this to the population) is always ready to explode  about things. Amusingly enough, this is expected.

In Psychology there is a Theory called the Fundamental Attribution Error. The theory states that when a person does something that  turns out bad, most often the reason is that something out of their control caused them to fail. This is perhaps most poignantly  displayed in an online gaming analogy. If you get killed in a game, the reason is the other guy cheats. On the other hand, when interpreting the actions of another person, the reason for failure is most often internal. An example of this is: Stardock's QA service  failed to fix these bugs, therefore SD's QA service is bad.

Now, we don't know anything about the internal state of Stardock's QA team. Nor do we know very much about the internal state of how SD and GPG work together. If you have ever worked on a complicated project, you know that things are often driven by the scale and momentum of a project. Often as not, things crop up that were unexpected, and these things determine a large portion of how the project ends up. It is no different for SD and GPG than it is for Capcom or EA.

Consider this, how do you think XXX would have supported Demigods (XXX removed to reduce flaming, you can figure it out if you want to)? Do you really want a game that rootkits your machine, is completely unsupported from day 1, and is disowned by the company shortly after release.

Now, at this point, someone is probably going to bring up Blizzard (or a similar company). With an argument like, SD should be more like Blizzard. Blizzard's support of WoW is really good. I'd like to address this by asking a few questions of my own.

1. Blizzard makes how much per day in subscription fees with WoW?
2. Blizzard takes how long to fix bugs that were in WoW since day 1?
3. Did you actually play WoW for the first year and visit their forums?

SD doesn't have the budget to spend on the game, especially since they are only the North American publisher for Demigods. Have you seen how much Atari has recently contributed to Demigod development? Blizzard
takes forever to make obvious changes, just like any other company. It isn't that they hate the game, its that these things take time. As for the stability and playability of WoW, go talk to Paladins that have played since beta. How often have you gotten to one-shot a world boss?

Summary

• SD isn't the bad guy here.
• GPG isn't the bad guy here.
• If you want things to be better, do something constructive, and don't just whine on the forums.

Whatever, MixMagic.

I'm going to hold you to that post you made about Demigod 2 as much as I do Society Frogboy =P

I really miss the sense of communication we got over the summer with Demigod. You don't get that with any other company. Demigod 2 would be incredible. I think both GPG and Stardock know exactly what would need to be done.