Definitely one of the direction PC gaming is headed. With piracy as an issue, more success has been found by going with the pirates instead of against. I know League of Legends is doing this and I'll be curious to see how that goes.
On the flip side, Quake Live (being free) is now considering adding monthly payment for premium content (ability to host own servers, etc) because being free has its drawbacks. In being free, you have to be VERY compliant with your customers.
I wonder what Demigod would have been like had you had your way.
Oh that would be a very lengthy discussion. It would be different -- and not necessarily better. It's not merely because I'm a GPG fan boy that I say that Gas Powered Games are full of top tier craftsmen.
I tend to prefer more game mechanics. If you like the flags and Citadel upgrades those are examples of what I was involved with.
But what makes Demigod stand out IMO are things I would never have imagined in the first place. The rook moving and seeing dust come off his towers. I would not only have not thought of it but if one of my modelers started trying to do that I would have forbid it for cost reasons.
The story of Demigod's development would make a very interesting book. It's really a tale of 3 designers. Scathis, Mike Marr, and myself. There are no villains in this story but if there is a hero, it's Mike Marr. He's the guy who had to take the design concepts that Scathis had and myself and make it work in the available, very limited budget.
Let me put this in perspective:
People talk about Demigod vs. League of Legends. Riot Games has gotten $15 MILLION in funding. The Demigod budget was less than a third of that. But GPG took their budget and made a pretty awesome experience.
By contrast, as some of you from the beta know, if I had had my way, the scope of Demigod would have been much larger but the polish a lot less.
In my opinion, when you buy a Gas Powered Games title, you're buying something knowing that there's real craftsmanship behind it. True works of art.
When you buy a Stardock-developed title, it's not art and it's not about craft or art. It's a GAME and everything takes a back seat to it being a GAME. Having Citadel upgrades and flags (originally the flags were supposed to give your team powers - additional spells but we couldn't get that in and balance it in the time we had) were things that mattered to me.
By contrast, the concept of "Generals" was something I wanted to get rid of but we didn't think we could for marketing reasons -- they had already been discussed. I still think generals should have been eliminated and that time put on other things hindsight is 20/20.
Anyway, the point is, I think Demigod is a very good GAME that also have very good craftsmanship. And because of that, it's not going to die any time soon.
The fact of the matter, and I don't think there's much denying this. Demigod is one of the very very few modern RTS-type games that you can sit down with friends and play with new players without having to explain at length the myriad of game mechanics.
If you're going to get a bunch of guys together for a LAN party, Demigod is a fantastic game for that. It'll never show up on our MP stats though. But it's simplicity to play means it'll always have a built in community.
It'll just be a matter of when the price drops low enough to build up the online community more. But that isn't going to happen real soon because the sales at retail are too strong and as odd as we find it, most people aren't playing it on the Internet.
The upcoming Stardock Customer Report 2009 is going to go into this a lot more because it's significant (and newsworthy) data about strategy games online in terms of *retail* games.
