From Exemplary PR to Colossal Disaster (and back again) - What happened to Demigod?

It began with something game fans hadn't really experienced before. Here was a AAA title that had delivered a poor launch-day performance and the publisher stepped up to the plate, took responsibility for the problems and set about fixing them. On top of that the CEO of the publisher provided daily updates on the status of the issue(s).

The sheer excellence of the service kept the fans appeased for awhile. For quite a while, in fact. All the transparency, honesty and accountability in the world can't keep unhappy customers placated forever though. So what had to go wrong with Demigod for possibly the best PR effort in gaming history to run out of juice?

On Monday morning (EDT) Brad Wardell (CEO of Stardock) published a massive statement on his blog entitled, Demigod: So what the hell happened?. Kotaku picked up on it earlier yesterday (20 May 2009).

For those not in the know, a summary of the woes that befell Demigod.

• Gamestop "breaks the street date" (Frogboy lingo) of Demigod by selling it on 9 April already instead of waiting until 14 April. The release-day server infrastructure isn't ready and it's Easter weekend. Staff are called back from their Easter break to help deal with the problem.
• Demigod torrents are released onto trackers and by release day around 85% of players are using a warez copy (i.e. 85% of the users of Demigod pirated the game).
• An innocuous HTTP request that checks for updates brings Stardock's server infrastructure to it's knees. It's so bad some people struggle to even get in the game because it sits and waits for a response from the server. Launch day is a disaster.
• A patch shuffles (most) licensed users over onto a separate server infrastructure as well as disables the HTTP request at launch. This improves the situation dramatically.

It turns out, however, that there were some fundamental problems with the multiplayer matchmaking system provided by ImpulseReactor. This was compounded by bugs and perceived imbalances in Demigod itself. A particularly debilitating bug worth mentioning is the one where your Demigod will stop whatever it was doing when you activate an ability and then not return to the task when it's done casting the ability. Together with a bug that leaves a Demigod totally unresponsive until it moves, this allows another Demigod that you are busy ganking to get away while you scream at your monitor to make your mouse clicks do something.

All this started receiving mention on the Demigod forums in the first few weeks after launch, not to mention features like a replay system, a friends system that integrates better into the game, a better in-game chat system, a bettter lobby. Ke5trel on the Demigod forums put together a post that'll put any effort I make to summarise all the feature requests to shame. For four weeks (Frogboy counts three, but I count four) the multiplayer issues got all the attention.

I could find only one or two things Frogboy might have done wrong as ad-hoc community manager for the Demigod multiplayer debacle. The biggest by far is that he gave false hope by saying that the problem would be resolved by a certain date. His assessment was made with the information at hand and with the understanding of the problem that Stardock had at the time. As Stardock came to better understand the problem, what became known as the "Be-all End-all Multiplayer Fix" on the forum was delayed more and more, jading customers that had hoped on a fix by the second week after launch.

During the week leading up to the eventual major multiplayer patch which was released late on Thursday 15 May (EDT), it became evident that players were growing increasingly impatient. It felt like posts were generally more negative and that there were far more and far more vocal unhappy players posting. The unhappiest were those whose games were working before a patch and who then couldn't get into an online match after a patch.

This just goes to show that no matter how good your customer service is or how transparent you are, when you keep your customers waiting too long or if patches degrade performance even the most tolerant start getting impatient. They get to a point where they no longer want to hear promises, they want to see results.

Stardock managed  to still the growing volume of the grumbles when they released the major patch in preperation of the European retail release (which didn't quite happen as advertised, as I wrote previously). There are still some very unhappy people that either still can't play the game, or were able to play online once upon a time and now no longer can. According to Wardell those players are in the 5% minority, however. If the general tone of the responses are anything to go by, Stardock has managed to turn around an increasingly negative sentiment into a positive one reminiscent of the first daily update blogs.