The challenge with the Demigod IP is that people seem to think it "failed" when in fact, it was quite a successful game.  It only seems like a disappointment when people try to retroactively claim it was supposed to compete with LoL which is ridiculous.  It was supposed to be a tight RTS game with MOBA game mechanics. It was never ever designed as a competitive league game and would require a rewrite to become one.

What was amazing about Demigod is that it essentially demonstrated that you coudl take Supreme Commander's engine and with relative ease turn it into a very different game. And it remains one of the most visually stunning games out there.

But like i said, the IP has a lot of baggage because people seemed to be looking for reasons to pile onto anything that looked bad for GPG.  You'd think that Demigod shipped "broken".  The only area it was broken was that *internet* IP based multiplayer was hosed for the first few weeks and if THAT is a criteria for damning a game, then Diablo 3 is a "failure" as it had simuilar problems when it first shipped.  

Connecting tens of thousands of people at once on differing connections worldwide is very hard to do.  Obviously, if we had had to do it over again with the benefit of hindsight, we'd have done it as F2P.  But back then, retail was king. It was the primary way to get games into people's hands.  If it had come out even a year later, we could have done F2P as a massive beta and ironed out the network scaling.  But that would have required us to think of Demigod as a F2P, online competitive game rather than as an RTS with Dota-like mechanics.

Yes, though I consider that to be our fault, not GPG's.   That is, per the Gamers Bill of Rights, our retail copies had no copy protection. Gamestop released the game the Friday before Easter and pirates put the unprotected copy and put it up on Bittorrent. This, in turn, grossly overwhelmed our proxy servers (the servers that tell user A how to connect to user .  But I'd also argue that the infrastructure should have been able to handle even the warez level of users.

It's one of those urban legends where people try to say that the only reason Demigod didn't become the dominant moba style game is because it had connectivity issues for the first couple of weeks.  If seamless connectivity at launch was a requirement to become a blockbuster, then WoW, LoL and Diablo 3 (just to name 3 well known examples of games that had connectivity issues during their opening days) wouldn't have been successful.

The single biggest challenge to Demigod was that the F2P model got going just after Demigod launched.  It had to compete with HoN and LoL for players and those games were free.   It still did remarkably well but people assumed Demigod didn't become a mega hit because of its network connectivity at launch.  Occam's razor says that if you have 3 similar games and 2 of them are free to play, the one that isn't is going to be at a disadvantage.

When GPG designed Demigod, there was no LoL or HoN. They wanted (and succeeded) to make an RTS with Dota-like game mechanics. It was never imagined as an e-sports type game and there was no such thing as F2P at that point.

People seem to forget that Demigod reviewed very well. Average score was about 4 out of 5.

I've always wondered if a dual-track model would work.

Make a FTP limited model, but then offer a full-price model.   You'd lose money on the whales, but gain money on folks who don't want to keep chugging along bit by bit, as they'd know they'd get everything for one price. 

The main reason I've never gotten into a FTP games are twofold

a) A ftp model has to be unfun if you don't pay up.  If the game is fun without paying up, people will just not pay.   There was a scrapped NCSoft game called Exteel which was super-fun, until they put the pay stuff in, then it sucked because of the grinding. 

I just get skeptical of the money value of these games , as you're going to be constantly paying.  Compare that to a traditional game, where for $40 I can get 100-200 hours of decent to good quality gameplay.

Maybe it's where ftp came along at the first time in my life where I feel more time-poor than cash-poor, but I just don't get the appeal.

I tried Demigod. As a dota player for many years, Demigod was crap as MOBA game. No way around it. I cannot see any bigger other reason it didn't end well. Dota also worked over RTS netcode but that didn't stop it from becoming more popular then WC3 and start its own type of game genre. 

If you wanted to make a new Demigod game, you would be better to create a new engine to do it.  The models and other assets have value as does the IP.  But what really has hurt Demigod is the widespread (and mistaken) belief that Demigod was some kind of failure.  But that perception hurts it.

Demigod serves as a good PR lesson -- communicating with fans is not always the best route.  Demigod's initial networking issues were no more or less severe than many other, much higher profile, game launches.  

But Demigod was a success. It made millions of dollars, had a pretty sizeable user base right up until LoL shipped.

You should take a second crack at it, run through the campaign mode with someone.  It's a much better game than most of them are.  Where it fails is in the relatively short replay value it has.  Lots of depth compared to the others, but not a lot of variation, unlike what you get in LOL with several dozen characters to play against, yet most of them having only one or two very specific ways to use them.

Wildman kickstarter now officially cancelled: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gaspoweredgames/wildman-an-evolutionary-action-rpg/posts/403739

Servo is a CM. We wish GPG the best, but I wouldn't draw any conclusions until Chris makes an announcement on where things are headed next.

What's the point of drawing conclusions AFTER things are sorted??     You gotta guess and such before they tell how it is.