GameStop Breaks Street Day for Demigod

GameStop has broken the street date for Demigod, a game published by Stardock and created by Gas Powered Games. This means that the title was set to be simultaneously released via Impulse and in stores, but players were able to get it earlier in brick-and-mortar stores. It's a highly unusual move from GameStop and it could lead to Stardock breaking off all relations with the chain.

Brad Wardell, who is the chief executive officer of Stardock, says that the broken street date has had a big impact on the development team of the game, who “were looking forward to the weekend to recover. Instead, we found ourselves back at work having to turn on and configure the multiplayer matchmaking servers (we had enough for a beta, but not for thousands of people).”

Apart from more pressure on the team that worked on the game, Wardell is telling that the broken street date has also forced his company to release the game a day earlier on Impulse, its digital distribution service, and might have led to a maximization of piracy on the title. Still, it's much too early to know how much damage was generated by GameStop.

The retail chain did not comment on the story, but there is a lot of speculation that points out that the early release of Demigod in stores was a way of drawing customers, who might not have otherwise gone to the store and might have chosen to get the title via digital distribution on their home computers. Stardock has also explained that, “There have been plenty of discussions about whether Gamestop did this intentionally or not, which I won’t go into here.”

Still, Stardock has great expectations related to Demigod, expecting it to do better than Sins of a Solar Empire, which was created by Ironclad and generated more than eight million dollars in revenue.