It seems like this happens quite often.  I recall Borderlands street date was broken when it first came out.  The difference here though is the developer/publisher reaction.  In Borderlands case, they refused to allow legitimate pre-order customers to download the game from Steam before the official release date.  What Stardock is doing, releasing the game early for all that have preordered and put their faith in them, is a tremendously honorable move.

I don't think we care about MP right now. We want the single player asap !

Really hoping to get in some play time today.

Couldn't agree more. Thanks Stardock!  Can't wait till download time.

Wow, this sucks. Take legal action, if at possible. Even if it will derive you little monetary benefit. This trashing of indie developers cannot continue.

And wow, thanks for the early release.

OK, it is Sunday! WHERE IS MY GAME

Not completely understanding the business side, what damage is done when a few copies get sold a couple days early?

I would presume the damage thats done is pretty theoretical. All of the deals the game makes between the time the publishers sell it to distributors which end up putting the product on a shelf in retail basically comes down to this: If you sell it online first, retail sales would be hurt, people would buy it online first. The initial week is hype week after all, a great deal of sales tends to come the first week for anything - especially entertainment media like movies or videogames.

If retail sells before the Digital Distribution sites sell it, it could in theory hurt their sales too. The retailers have a great deal of clout when negotiating release dates. About 75% of sales are still done at retail, despite strong DD services such as Impulse, Steam and D2D. Retailers are in it for the money, if you sell your stuff a week before them - they are going to notice it in the sales statistics and be pretty upset. Next time it would be harder for you to negotiate either price or quantity, they want their sales numbers to shine and if they aren't getting first or equal dibs they get pretty upset.

Plus theres the pirate factor. If a game does not require very strict DRM like ubi's awful requires-the-internet-to-play-single-player and a pirate gets ahold of a release copy, it will be everywhere. You can't really count how many people pirate games, but if a game is out there for people to download before its even on sale that has got to kill the sales. The only positive argument i've ever heard for piracy is that it can get the game popular - but I seriously doubt it does anywhere as much help as it does harm.

And still - all of this is theoretical. You don't know how a game will sell no matter what the factors are contributing to it.

After all, hindsight is always 20/20

Even if some people were selling this game early, i'd think it would have to be a few smaller stores rather than something big. Its more likely stores selling copies to their employees - which is wrong but theres not any real way of stopping it completely in place today. Maybe some day they will have game keys linked to a receipt of sale that shows it was sold on release day and would not work before then. Kind of like those various game time cards sold at retail, but bound to a serial key for a game. But it still wouldn't work for a game that Stardock has generously left any activation requirement out. In their shoes, I certainly wouldn't trust anyone. But they do, and for that (and the fact they make freaking awesome games.. shh don't tell anyone) I envy them.

Apparently the guy who caused the whole mess even made a video of the unboxing....

*snort*. Yeah, that really works.  No, really. It's not at all possible to block the Ubisoft servers and replace it with some locally run dummy.

I spend my money on games that are worthwhile and wouldn't waste the time or energy on any others, but really the tech is out there for anyone if they want it.

Stardock gets it, and so I buy! The cynic in me says wallet voting is the only kind we really have. But I keep him in the cellar and call him dirty names, so he doesn't show up that often.

Out of curiosity, what are the serious consequences of a couple of stores releasing a few games a couple days early?

I dont know for sure,  but usualy the consequencese include cracks of the game being available Before the official release, whihc does sadly impact sales. In multiplayer games like demigod it results in heaver traffic on release date. this can impact game reviews if the dev teams have not fixed issues that were caused by the heaver traffic. This can result in lower sales overall. It also impacts sales at a store level. Eg. if EB releases the game early, and wallmart does not, everyone buys from EB rather than wallmart. Likewise, people will buy the box rather than the digital copy. Finaly in honerable companies like Stardoc, it likely costs any overtime they are paying out to their programmers to have the game ready for us a day early.

Overall the only people who benifit from the broken release date is the store that broke the release date. The penalty is usualy that if a single store become known forbreaking release dates, people like stardoc may start shipping the games to those stores so that they arrive a week or so after release. (one of the local stores in my area used to have this issue. I used to get my preorders 2 weeks after release)

Also, there's a lot of web content in this game that they made be unprepared for. Imagine what happens if all the servers that the game is supposed to connect to (eg updates, validations, mods, multiplayer) aren't online yet because the release is scheduled for Tuesday but suddenly people are trying to connect several days ahead of schedule. You can't have people connecting to a service that isn't where it's supposed to be just because someone didn't follow the proper schedule. Ultimately, that all comes back to look bad for Stardock, who did nothing wrong except setup or possibly expose those services ahead of their own time frame.

This can be contrasted with Stardock games, which I've never heard of anyone pirating, even people who normally pirate everything prefer to purchase legally when it's Stardock. Though that's based on personal experience, and might not be indicative of larger trends, as far as I know.

How this relates to the early release... well, it doesn't directly. But the important thing is that Stardock is probably not hurt too gravely by this, even though other developers might be.

The broken start date really sucks, but thanks for keeping us in the loop and THANK YOU for letting us come to the party early.  I'm just a preorder, so am probably in the back of the line.  But I'll take anything I can get.  Heck, just getting the game 5 minutes early would make me happy. 

Drool...  Modding tools.... 

Unfortantely the people who pirate games because of the DRM are outclassed dramatically by people who pirate because

A: It's free.

B: You don't have to get off your ass to do it

This game could cost $0.01 and people would still pirate it.  Google some statistics on the Humble Indie Bundle, quite sad.

DRM isn't to prevent pirates as much as it is to prevent reselling it, and in the case of limited installs)force the buyer to buy another one.

I am guilty to say I hope newegg is shipping them out early -- I want to play now

Demigod was a major release from Stardock and their servers tanked the first few days from all the pirates playing. (something like that anyway, I remember them saying something about there being many more pirates than actual paid copies connecting to one of their servers) My friends never got into the game so my copy has mostly been unused since I bought it. I've played like once since the new characters were released. (which coincidentally enough I bought retail @ target - even though I love buying DD games from impulse and steam... I think it may have been my first impulse game ever - which now makes sense as to why I bought it retail.)

Though now after i've looked over it, Demigod was technically only published by Stardock, not developed... so maybe you're right. But I doubt piracy is much less prevalent with Stardock's games than with any other small-medium sized developer. 

At least from what Stardock has said in the past - production costs are relatively low for their games compared to the blockbuster titles such as MW2/Starcraft2/Halo. They don't spend tens of millions on development of one release so they don't depend on selling several million copies the first week to break even. If the game tanks after all that money spent the developer more often than not tends to go the way of the dodo since they are often paid on advance royalties, but Stardock would likely survive since it has roots in publishing and its own DD platform now even if they were to make a game that didn't sell well.

Even with a smaller budget, it always seems like Stardock puts out tons of extra content after their games are released. I guess not paying mint for celebrity voice actors or several hundred man development teams means you can focus on a project longer, and its more of a love child than a job for the employees (i'd presume). If the devs here don't love the games they make it doesn't show, because I certainly love GalcivII and SoaSE.

From wikipedia of sins of a solar empire: "As of September 2008, Stardock's CEO, Brad Wardell, has stated that the game has sold over 500,000 units, with 100,000 of those being digital download sales, on a budget of less than $1,000,000.^[7] It sold 200,000 copies in its first month of release alone."

Those numbers are... absolutely impressive. Granted much is lost in distribution costs, And this was september 2008, before all the expansions were out. I hear wholesale price for retailers isbetween 30 and 35$ for a 50$ game. So lets say they got paid 25$ per retail copy and be somewhat conservative - that still means they had a revenue of 10 million from retail, and assuming all 100k units of DD were 50$ about five million from their own DD service. something like 15 million for a ~1million cost game? Those are some pretty big returns. I wonder what the expansions brought their final numbers up to. I bet it is no less impressive.

Something I failed to realize: SoaSE wasn't completely developed by Stardock, it was technically developed by ironclad. However, this article on Gamasutra written by Brad Wardell (ceo of stardock) and Blair Frasier (one of the founders of ironclad) goes into saying "Nearly every game design element and mechanic had input from both teams. Had this not been done, odds are the reviews and sales of Sins of a Solar Empire would have been dramatically different." Which I read as a joint effort between Stardock and Ironclad.

Wow... thats one heck of a tangent... piracy to sales figures from SoaSE and a extra tangent on Sins' development. lmfao.

I bet by that time in september 2k8 SoaSE was pirated an equal or greater number of units sold. I can't find any statistics for it... i'm sure if one were to look they would find it somewhere.

I didn't really know anything about stardock till I picked up demigod. Feels like a lot longer than a year and a half since then though. I got SoaSE with entrenchment a month after getting Demigod. GalCiv sometime last year... 

Sorry for the wall of text folks. Waiting for this game is giving me the need to read stuff and talk about it. I can't sleep anyhow...

It's a reality of physics and will always be, still I can't help but to dislike that 'bigger bodies' automatically deserve respect, or at least partial groveling. One of the mildly amusing things in life is being able to tell people whose egos have been dangerously inflated by belonging to some organisation and who are requesting something mildly absurd thanks to this to go hang (in a polite way).

Still, hope this won't hurt you terribly.

Edit: ed out some ramblings.

Oh, so that means the version being released (hopefully) today will be the Day 0 version?

Since gameplay example 5 uses the day 0 version, I assume yes.

work faster!

This. There's actually a really good article a few years back where Brad himself made a comment that you don't take pirates into account when looking for profit margins, because pirates are going to pirate anyway, they're not your customers and so they don't matter from the financial end or from the game mechanics end.

He won himself at least one consumer (that would be me by the by) just from having business sense there. . . As someone who in the past used to sail the cyber seas with the jolly roger flag (and has since turned their life around and gone legit! Rehabilitated!! Ok, mostly just "hit their 30s and realized how much of a jackass they were being"), I can assure you, that the vast majority of Pirates don't care about whether or not DRM is in the game, or the cost of the game. $5 is more than they're willing to pay.

The subset of Pirates that actually concern themselves with supporting the industry are incredibly, incredibly small.

Thank you Brad!  That's why we love and support Stardock!  You guys always look after your customers!

I h8 that they did this to you and I know other devs who would have passed the buck along (broken release date) to us and we would be waiting who know how long, so thank you!

I hope Elemental sells a gazillion copies, then you won't be an Indie much longer!

There's nothing bad about being indie at all! In fact nowadays it's actually an enormous plus! Indie doesn't also mean that you're not making huge amounts of money, it just means that you don't belong to some freakin big company that sucks the life out of your dev team.

Thats why I really enjoy most Stadock games and software. It just FEELS good.

On one hand stealing is always wrong, but the industry does help push the point that just maybe once in awhile you steal the game before you buy it.

Let me explain. I buy alot of computer games, anything besides WoW i will buy from Blizzard or any team that left Blizzard that worked on there first few games (StarCraft, Diablo, WarCraft2 teams) They are a good company, and do a good job and offer great support. Maxis used to be like that until they got bought by EA and Will Wright became a whore Then you had Ensemble, another good company with good testing and support.

Then there is Dreamcatcher, and Sierra, Ubisoft, EA, and a whole who of other makers. Dont let me forget JoWood. Never have i seen such blatant disreguard for support then with JoWood.

However i buy games from all makers legally, but the last few years I keep getting nailed by the fact that people release so many unfinished crappy games, I make good money, and pay good money for my PC game addiction, but honestly the next time I go to by a JoWood game im probably going to play it first before I buy it. The industry really is partly to blame for the piracy problem. Game prices keep rising but i think quality as a whole does keep declining. Also the use of Spawns and real Demos are getting to be more and more a thing of the past. People dont release demos often anymore.

Industry as a whole is weaker on so many levels then say 10 years ago. (Thanks console whores. No keyboard and mouse? Savages ) Without demos and spawns customers dont get a chance to test the product before they buy, so alot of games are released in poor condition, and if sales dont take off on there half done game right off the bat, they drop support for it and it never gets near finished.

I didnt try the political machine games cause its not my style, but anything else Stardock has touched since i first found GalCiv2 has been gold. Elemental is actually the first game I have ever preordered. Hopefully this commitment to quality in the long term wins over a few pirates and slowly but surely converts them to real customers.

S.R.

Well my thread asking for help was just deleted so in my looking around I found this thread to be the most relevant to my issue.  Long story short I had heard about this game and wanted to check it out.  Didnt have a good idea of the release date, I actually thought it was in September.  Today I was in a store, saw this game and bought it.  I came home, installed it, and immediately was greeted with a box saying "the game is not available" and to go to elementalgame.com for more information.  I did that, I came here, I posted about my issue and the thread was deleted. 

Obviously since then I have read threads, see what is going on with the beta testers, pre orders, street dates, launches, etc.  I believe this is a good company as I have enjoyed sins of a solar empire for a while now.  

I am however disappointed that I bought this game, came home, put it in my computer and was then told I am not allowed to play what is on my computer.  I know a lot of people here played this beta and have been waiting for this game for a REALLY REALLY long time and I know now it must suck to see someone just buy the game when you were supposed to get it before anyone else.  

Its just rough from my persecutive.  I'm at the store, see something that looks sweet and buy it, then cannot play it.  My dissapointment only comes from a desire to play what looks to be an awesome game.