Stardock sends a little follow-up to news of the impact of piracy on the launch of Demigod. One thing they want to clarify is the 18,000 legitimate user figure bandied about represents how many legit users were trying to connect, not how many copies of the game they sold. They also point out that this represents more than the current daily peak simultaneous user figures on the Steam stats page for Left 4 Dead or Team Fortress 2, and a fraction of the capacity they had planned for, but the unauthorized users ruined that plan. Here's a bit more:

The infrastructure was designed to handle up to 50,000 of these connections.

But on day 0, there were around 140,000 concurrent users of which 18,000 are validated.

Pirated users can't get updates or play multiplayer but they still touch the servers.

So over the first 24 hours, we had to essentially scrap together a doppleganger of the infrastructure dedicated to Demigod's multiplayer network needs, release an update to legitimate users to point them to it.

The result was that in the first day, day and a half, users couldn't connect to each other (the connection servers would time out) and even the in game experience was horrible getting through menus and such because even a simple HTTP keep alive call (something as simple as a http call to check for the latest version to inform users if there's a new version) would cause the in game UI to hang.

The consequence is two-fold: First, early customers got a TERRRIBLE experience. Second, the reviews (notably Gamespot) based their review on this terrible experience.

Now today, day 3, it's pretty much taken care of. Users are connecting in multiplayer, the servers are pretty responsive and we're adding more in preparation for the weekend.