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Demigod is early announces the Impulse Website has word that GameStop apparently broke the street date for Demigod last week, and so the game is now live and can now be purchased on Impulse, though it still won't be in stores until tomorrow. This resulted in folks from Stardock having to rush into work on a holiday weekend to turn on and configure the game's multiplayer matchmaking servers. The post also points out this will be an interesting test case for their theories that "intrusive, obnoxious copy protection will result in more sales than we lose from people who don’t want to mess with it," as the game carries no DRM:

Imagine if Demigod had shipped with some nasty retail copy protection and got released early. Someone “cracks” it but doesn’t do a good job and the game ends up crashing randomly or something. Most people would just assume the game was buggy and that would likely cause more lost sales than the initial piracy did.

The good news, however, is that we’ll get to actually see the effects of piracy. Since we know Demigod is an outstanding game with a wide appeal with equal retail and digital distribution to other titles that came out this year with similar demographics we can see how well it sells compared to them.

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PLYMOUTH, MI (APRIL 14, 2009) - Stardock (www.stardock.com) announced today that its much anticipated PC real-time action strategy game, Demigod is now available for purchase at most retail outlets in North America as well as available worldwide digitally via Impulse (www.impulsedriven.com) at the same price ($39.95) no matter where the person is located.

Developed by renowned gaming studio Gas Powered Games, Demigod lets players take control of an immensely powerful being whose goal is to defeat his brethren in a series of epic arenas in order to ascend into the pantheon of the gods. During the course of each battle, players gain experience, purchase equipment, learn magical spells, capture key resources and upgrade their Citadel while working to lay waste the opposing faction.

Demigod battles take place in spectacular environments that are visually stunning and yet still run well on relatively older hardware thanks to a new technology developed by Gas Powered Games that optimizes the way rendering is executed on most video cards.

“Demigod in many ways captures the combined spirit of two hit Gas Powered Games titles – Supreme Commander and Dungeon Siege,” said Brad Wardell, president & CEO of Stardock. “In Demigod, the player controls a massively powerful unit who in some ways is like the commander in Supreme Commander except here, like in Dungeon Siege, the character can purchase equipment, buy items, and go up in level as he gains experience to access more powerful skills.”

In single player, Demigod provides both a skirmish mode for individual battles as well as a tournament in which players choose a Demigod and compete against other Demigods controlled by the computer to gain the most favor points with the gods in order to ascend.

In multiplayer, players can compete in online skirmishes in which matches players together based on their skill and experience or participate in the Pantheon, a persistent online tournament in which players choose a faction and earn favor points to through victory in the arena. Wins, losses, experience and much more is available.

Demigod is also the first PC title to make full use of Stardock’s new development platform, Impulse Reactor which provides Demigod with its in-game community features (friends, chat, tournaments, matchmaking, and more).

Like all Stardock games, the retail version of the game contains no DRM or copy protection. It includes Impulse to allow users to update to the latest version or even re-download the entire game. Players can install the game on multiple computers via Impulse without a hassle.

For further details about Demigod, please visit www.demigodthegame.com.

For more information about Stardock please visit www.stardock.com.