Only 23% Even Attempted To Play Multiplayer Demigod

By xclavex on November 23, 2009 1:13:26 PM from

Stardock are an unusual company in a whole load of ways. One of them is that despite being a privately hold company, they do a report to the public. No financials, but there’s a mass of transparency here. The full document is worth at least a skim read, but there’s plenty of information worth picking over for industry watchers. The details on Impulse’s success are fascinating, but the fact which most immediately screamed out was that only 23% of the people who actually bought Demigod even tried to play online multiplayer. I stress tried. If you attempted to log onto the server, you’re part of the 23%, not matter whether you succeeded in actually playing a game or not. I’ve quoted the section below in full…

For Stardock, the more significant shock of Demigod has been the discovery of the low number of PC gamers who play strategy games online. Demigod’s single player experience, while decent, did not get anywhere near the care that the Internet multiplayer experience did. Despite this, only 23% of people who have purchased Demigod have ever even attempted to logon to play Internet multiplayer.

Demigod continues to sell thousands of copies weekly – enough to remain at retail during the Christmas season despite it coming out last Spring – but the number of people available to play online is typically less than 2,000 at a given time. This is in stark contrast to MMORPGs and FPS’s which tend to have very large online communities.

Our conclusion is that strategy games that we make and publish in the future will support multiplayer but will not sacrifice the single player experience to do so.
Developer Gas Powered Games has continued to update and provide support to Demigod despite its work on Supreme Commander 2. At the time of writing, two new demigods are nearly completed along with a couple of significant updates.

Let’s repeat the key point again: 23%.

Now, the debate over the importance of the multiplayer community to games in general and strategy games in particular has always gone back and forth. It’s certainly true that the most actual outspoken strategy gamers – both critics and general fans – are devotees of the multiplayer experience, up to the point of totally dismissing any form of single player campaign. They’ll perhaps forgive Skirmish mode, but the vast majority of those who are serious about strategy game looks down on Campaign players.

The debate normally turns up the fact that the majority of players actually only play the single-player stuff at all, but it’s rare there’s actually any hard numbers to back it up. This is about as hard a number as you can get. In a game whose single-player was absolutely vestigial, over three-quarters of players didn’t even log into the server, let alone play a game, let alone partake in what’s apparently the only thing worth talking about in online discourse.

It’s an interesting one. The counter argument is easy – that the biggest RTS games have enormous communities, and it’s those communities that have kept the game successful. But let’s say… well, maybe they’re freaks. South Korea, bless it, isn’t normal. You can’t plan a game making business on assuming you’re going to be one of two games. You have to assume you’re one of the majority. And, of course, it’s worth noting: for the period they were released in, both Starcraft and Warcraft III had splendid campaign modes. And… well, I wonder if Blizzard would ever give out the lifetime stats on Blizznet. As in, what percentage of those sales (outside of Korea) actually have a Blizznet account that’s ever played a game. There’s a number I’d like to hear. But for now, the DemiGod 23% is a statistic which I’ll keep in mind when thinking about RTS games.

Any other interesting numbers? Well, last year 42% of Stardock’s consumers bought digitally. This year, 61%. That’s a hefty rise.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/11/19/only-23-even-attempted-to-play-multiplayer/#more-21337

*Chortle*

+6 Karma | 69 Replies

Yeah, some people can be overly negative. But if you just join noob games or host them yourself, you should be ok .

@colonol_jesss

GPGnet is horrible, GPG has the WORST internet out of any game. Demigod is based on the supcom engine thats why it's networking is so damn bad. And Demigod was totally a fanboy game, some times I wonder if gamedev's have any brains at all. If they wanted Demigod to do better they needed to make ita full blown RTS. GPG wanted in on the DOTA action and copied it. Now there's heroes of newerth which > demigod. Also Quake3 sold less then single player quakes 1 + 2, hence Quake 4 had single player, since Quake 3 didn't sell as many copies as other quakes because it was online only.

Quoting niz032,

reply 52

@colonol_jesss
GPGnet is horrible

THAT is whats wrong with multiplayer gaming on the computer now. Every company thinks they have to make some fancy UI with a lobby and friends list in order to make multiplayer work.

I just got GC2 Ultimate as a gift this morning... after installing it I was a little disappointed to find out there was no LAN/multiplayer option at all. I'm not going to get into a full GC2 topic here for obvious reasons... but when I did a search for a patch or a reason "why" I found a few articles that mentioned stats like as in the topic above.

"Only 23% Even Attempted To Play Multiplayer". Maybe, it's because people dont want to have to register and log in and connect to a global server to just enjoy a simple LAN party. My bf and I play civ4 games that last weeks. We're talkin gigantic maps, Epic game length kind of games... and it works great for us. Occasionally we will have a friend or two over.. or host an IP based/email game.... That might make us an exeption but I don't like playing some games online. Stategy games are a perfect example because when you finally posistion your troops for the attack... and your opponent leaves, or has a little cry about something being cheap. We prefer to have games (either free for all or co operative) where you can take your time a little knowing that there will actually be a point where someone will finish the game.

When I was reading this article is just kept shaking my head... The numbers that show above, are of people who not only purchased that game... but those who actually took the time to create a "profile" so they could login to the multiplayer portal.

LAN, direct IP, even basic server lists, should not require that amount of work, and some people are sensitive with privacy policies. Not to mention the amount of work from a developer stand point... making tiered match options and fancy lobbies with chatrooms for the non players, that COULD possilby be a waste of time and money.

Back to my original point. I got a fun game as a gift, but because I'm either not capable of manually typing an IP or the developer thought it was too much work to justify the cost, consumers still get stuck with no choice or crappy interfaces.

Choice Please.

End

Quoting niz032,

reply 52

@colonol_jesss

GPGnet is horrible, GPG has the WORST internet out of any game. Demigod is based on the supcom engine thats why it's networking is so damn bad.

this is nonsense. supcom's networking is excellent. name another RTS where you can have almost 500 ping and it feels exactly the same as a LAN game.

some people are really clueless.

the name of the networkign library is RakNet. It's used in a large library of indie games, but none (that I know of) with as large of a scope as demigod.

quoting post

Now, the debate over the importance of the multiplayer community to games in general and strategy games in particular has always gone back and forth. It’s certainly true that the most actual outspoken strategy gamers – both critics and general fans – are devotees of the multiplayer experience, up to the point of totally dismissing any form of single player campaign. They’ll perhaps forgive Skirmish mode, but the vast majority of those who are serious about strategy game looks down on Campaign players.

I bolded your big fat lie, no way did I dismiss supreme commander single player, in fact I loved the skirmish mode and WISHED the single player didn't suck so hardcore. I didn't play online but I would just play skirmish.

The thing you have to remember is that Demigod is a second rate Defense of the ancients (warcraft 3 mod) everyone looks at demigod as an "also ran" that wanted to get in on the success of the warcraft 3 mod. Demigod was totally a fanboy game, it's not surprising your numbers suck. GPG is not blizzard, what is funny is that the arrogance of "only 23% online" is really just a statement about the lack of development effort that went into demigod. Lets face it the guys worknig on demigod were not the best or the brightest, the netcode on release was horrible the game tried to copy DOTA and then wonders why it's not as successful as other better versions of it like heroes of newerth, etc.

Demigod is not that good, the real problem is that Gas powered games is still a mediocre developer who can't develop Triple A games, they develop B+ games at best. Go play supreme commander 1 and it's like the guys at gas powered games NEVER played starcraft 1, so many lessons were learned from other real time strategy games like Company of Heroes and Starcraft (which is ANCIENT by now, so no excuses).

I think the real reason is that demigod had a troubled development and was starved for real resources, that and the people who made it couldn't decide on the direction of the game, it comes off as if the game was developed by developers at war with one another, I heard the lead for demigod left since it wasn't the game he had in his mind.

^I might take your posts a little more seriously if in your first post you hadn't made it completely clear you don't know what you're talking about.

Demigod doesn't use GPGNet. HoN and LoL are far closer to copies of DoTA then Demigod. The rest of your post is opinion BS that makes a lot of baseless assumptions.

^Except you couldn't point out where I was wrong specifically, so you don't have any point at all and are just full of hot air. Demigod uses the same base netcode as supcom does, it's the exact same engine. Demigod was built from the supcom engine This is why you can "Strategic zoom" in Demigod just like in Supreme commander 1 and upcoming 2.

Go play supreme commander 1 and it's like the guys at gas powered games NEVER played starcraft 1, so many lessons were learned from other real time strategy games like Company of Heroes and Starcraft (which is ANCIENT by now, so no excuses).

Supreme Commander and StarCraft are inherently different games. What exactly do you want Supreme Commander to learn from StarCraft?

Quoting niz032,

reply 58

. . .

seriously?

Graphics engine != Networking Engine.

Seriously.

Go to http://www.demigodthegame.com look at the bottom-right of the page. Notice the logo for "RakNet". Google "RakNet". Be amazed.

@abuggerbhedige

Quote brad Wardell

We’ve learned that you can’t treat networking as just another thing to plug in like you would a sound library or even a 3D engine. It’s a whole different animal. With Elemental (our next game), it’s single-player focused but its MP will be server based (and I mean we literally host the game). After Demigod, I don’t ever want to hear the words “socket” or “port” again.

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2009/05/what-went-wrong-with-demigod/

http://frogboy.impulsedriven.net/article/352561/Demigod_So_what_the_hell_happened

I'm glad brad came clean that they were game development newbies who never dealt seriously with real networking before IMHO. This is all because of their own hubris (bad design decisions) and lack of QA assurance. And this is exactly why people pirate, they get burned by devs that don't do proper QA.

Quoting niz032,

reply 58

I pointed out specifically where you were wrong. Demigod doesn't use GPGNet, it uses RakNet. Demigod is also much less of a clone of DoTA than HoN and LoL. Besides that you're blowing a lot of hot air because you don't like GPG and think they make crap games.

Niz just shup up because I will rape you. Starcraft is a crap game, Dota wasent made by blizzard and blizzard isnt such a good developer as you claim. Also the networking engine was not the moho engine(supcoms) but Raknet.

Quoting lifekatana,

reply 63

Sorry your wrong. They didn't do proper QA and released a broken game on release, and then turn around and complain about pirates. People pirate exactly for this reason - a bunch of fanboy devs get together, create a game they want to play without doing market research, then are "surprised" at the low number of faboys like themselves, then say "from now on we do single player only" I mean if that doesn't scream "I'm a newbie to game development" what does? They were totally unprofessional in their release of a game the didn't properly beta-test on mass.

UPDATE:

Quote Pantherace:

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/06/07/0413218

What's funny is when this article got posted on /., and last night, it was pretty much impossible to play online, due to something with their servers. For

The game itself is good. Stardock's ImpulseReactor is bad. Impulse isn't so great. The engine isn't really to blame (some fundamental bugs though)

I've played about 120 games online, and win about 50% of those.

In the initial release, they always tried to use NAT punchthrough. This includes when it wasn't needed. This put more load on their servers and made it slow to connect. Maybe piracy played some role, but given how it worked after it was 'fixed' I rather doubt piracy was the main problem, but more of an excuse.

There are some ISPs (and routers) that mess with port numbering for UDP receive. This screws up the P2P network connection.
Demigod/Supreme Commander speak a sandboxed lua in communication. Impulse sends and receives XML, and they wrote some translation layer in there, which was losing messages.

Stardock implemented some proxies for fixing some problems, unfortunately the proxies are in my opinion, buggy. I've been sitting next to two people, and the same person connects to two of us fine, then proxied to the other. Uhhh, wtf? Additionally, they seem to have a tendency to crash, fucking up the game.

According to Stardock, Stardock didn't write the NAT punchthrough, but licensed it from Raknet. Also, now Raknet of that denies it's used in Demigod. (And technically, it's not used in the engine, only the connection making, which is the real place where the BIG FUCKING PROBLEM is.)

Impulse needs to be smacked with even the GNOME HIG guidelines, Apple's, even CDE's. Seriously, wtf? (I know it's trying to look like the latest office. There are so many people that have problems with the interface because of that. Unless you've seen Office a lot you won't recognize that the orb in the upper left is a menu, and even if you have seen office, you will likely miss it because it looks like an oversize decoration. Disclaimer: I don't like Office's new interface style in the first place.)

Impluse's chat is a webpage, even though it's IRC, which requires IE's security settings to be set to default, it doesn't work if that's set higher.

Demigod itself:
Suffers from the problem of being designed with Microsoft's tools that have been focused on the Xbox, and using similar ideas. For example, running at the speed of the slowest isn't a problem when you have a homogeneous environment. PCs aren't homogeneous.
Has some issues with the UI and communications due to all computers running the sim, and having to wait for every other computer's packets.
Occasionally a desync (sim wasn't the same across all computers), which I have only seen about 3 times.
Crashes occasionally, usually on connecting to a port, due to a UPNP call. (This might really belong under Impulse.)

Plus sides:
Less so now, but Stardock people are commonly on their IRC.
If they are on, they generally try to be helpful, or such.
The game is *very good*, especially on a LAN (or the internet when it works). Remarkably balanced in my opinion, for a newly released game. There are a couple of things which I think might need to be hit with a nerf bat, but they aren't very many.

Oh, and while there is single player, it's not designed for it. For anyone wanting to play it, play a few games against the AI to understand the basic game, then DON'T PLAY AGAINST THE AI, if you ever intend to play humans. It teaches you bad habits. For example I played with friends against AIs a few games, getting something like a 33-1 K:D ratio against the 'hard' AI. The next games I played against humans, I got waxed.

Quoting Myles,

reply 62

Quoting niz032,
reply 58
^Except you couldn't point out where I was wrong specifically, so you don't have any point at all and are just full of hot air. Demigod uses the same base netcode as supcom does, it's the exact same engine. Demigod was built from the supcom engine This is why you can "Strategic zoom" in Demigod just like in Supreme commander 1 and upcoming 2.

I pointed out specifically where you were wrong. Demigod doesn't use GPGNet, it uses RakNet. Demigod is also much less of a clone of DoTA than HoN and LoL. Besides that you're blowing a lot of hot air because you don't like GPG and think they make crap games.

No as gamers many people get frustrated by half-baked releases, and then devs wonder why people pirate their games - because they (the devs) didn't finish it in the first place and were only looking for $, if they cared about their customers they wouldn't release the game unfinished to start with. Counter intuitvely I criticize because I care and I see a lot of potential in games that never live up to it, and developers excuses get tiring after a while, esp when you bought the game.

I think we all get that you don't like the game niz, but no amount of whining is going to change the fact that many (most) players that have played Demigod at the very least like the game while many others (like myself) think it is a great game with a terribly flawed multiplayer system.

Basically, unless you want to get back on topic, I would ask that you refrain from dragging the thread down any further please. This isn't a "let's bash Demigod" thread.

niz032 is playing quite often, so I think he likes the game too. I guess he mainly wants to increase the online player base by giving Demigod out for free (even though it's not that expensive anyway) and justifies this by the "poor quality of the game".

Polished games are pirated regardless. Pirates don't have a moral: they just want to play the game for freez.

Of course out of your posts I can reek your ignorance:

Suffers from the problem of being designed with Microsoft's tools that have been focused on the Xbox, and using similar ideas. For example, running at the speed of the slowest isn't a problem when you have a homogeneous environment. PCs aren't homogeneous. NO. This is called p2p, 90% of the stratehy games use p2p.
Has some issues with the UI and communications due to all computers running the sim, and having to wait for every other computer's packets. NO YOU MORON. UI iS FINE, Waiting for other computers packets IS unavoidable, no strategy game let your computer go without the others packets.
Occasionally a desync (sim wasn't the same across all computers), which I have only seen about 3 times. -THIS happens with all game, and they are extremely uncommon. (sim has nothing to do with it though)
Crashes occasionally, usually on connecting to a port, due to a UPNP call. (This might really belong under Impulse.)- yeah this sucks.

Forum necromancy, the game everyone loves to hate.

I'm going to guess that the other 77% are like my buddies and I who enjoy DG as a LAN game. As such it beats the hell out of anything similar, and without having to deal with game wait times and a competitive community, there's nothing to sour the experience.

Also, internet connectivity is sometimes an issue... online games seem to require faster connectivity and more bandwidth than some countries - like mine - can consistently support. Embarrassingly enough. Which is really a shame, since a connection that can manage World of Warcraft should really be able to handle this.

The Forums Are Now Closed!

The content will remain as a historical reference, thank you.

Only 23% Even Attempted To Play Multiplayer Demigod