I know we want to get the fixes we have for multiplayer connectivity in as soon as possible (ideally first week of January).
Here's the deal:
How many times have you bought a game and couldn't get it to work online or found it to just not have been thoroughly tested for multiplayer? I know it bugs the heck out of me.
Here we have the opportunity to address just that. To make sure that we try out these new game modes, make sure multiplayer works as well as humanly possible, and so on.
The single player part of Demigod is very important, no doubt about that. But where Demigod will likely live on in the long term is the multiplayer tournaments we're developing. The technology behind the tournaments is stuff that, at the risk of sounding bold, have never been done before. We want to make sure this stuff works very well.
Stardock and GPG are privately held. We don't have to release games because of some arbitrary fiscal quarter for stock holders. We can push to April if we want simply because we want to make sure the game is awesome. If we do this right, Demigod could be 2009 game of the year (we hope).