Err....Are you insinuating that I haven't bought Demigod? Because, as a matter of fact, I have. I've bought GalCiv 2 as well, for what that's worth.
I wasn't referring to you. 
I don't think people realize thought that game developers and publishers aren't cut throat.
I always see these Steam vs. Impulse threads, for instance, where people don't realize that we play each others games.
Someone buying Leage of Legends isn't a lost sale. Heck, I'd love to see League of Legends on Impulse. Or have it support the Impulse MP listing so I could pick and choose which games to join in the Impulse MP list.
The point being, there's no need for people to see it as us vs. them.
I think I have a pretty good handle on what Demigod needs to stay relevant in the long-term. The real question is merely whether I can convince GPG to invest in doing those things and that will depend on a zillion factors not the least being sales.
I know some people don't like talking about that but how substantial after release updates are always based on sales. They were for Galactic Civilizations, Sins of a Solar Empire and yes, Demigod too.
Demigod is the 8th best selling game in North America which is saying something given we have to compete against Sims 3 and WoW and such and took a beating in reviews (quite deservedly IMO) because of the crappy MP experience when the game first shipped.
You want Demigod to have a long-term user base? Here's what you have to do:
- Release 1 new Demigod every other month
- Release 1 new map every other month.
- Make it so that people can put out mods and get them used easily.
- Keep updating the balance.
- Make the freaking Pantheon bullet proof
- Continue to add more MP options from clans to team joins on up.
- Make it easier for people to get into games and be aware of games even if they're not currently running the game.
- Make it easier for groups to get games going on the fly even if they don't happen to have the game going.
These 8 things are the minimum you would need to do.
Now, will Stardock and GPG able to do the 8 things I list above? I don't know. The fact is, things take longer than they should take. I had expected the 2 new Demigods to have already been released. But then again, I did not know we'd have to spend huge amounts of time and money building a Battle.net type system from scratch after release.
The pantheon was designed with a level of naivete that is quaint now. It'll have to be redone IMO to be reliable because people just quit and you end up with 3 v 1 or 3 v 2 or even 3 v 0.
Luckily, custom games work but that's not really enough. We all know the path that MP games with custom games goes so ther'es no point exploring that dark future.
And I should mention that all 8 of those things have to be done before the natural ebb and flow of the game's lifespan puts its window of opportunity behind it.
Right now, the community is growing faster than people are leaving (despite the occasional European who feels compelled to come on and say there's only 4 games avialable and therefore it's dead despite not realizing that the metric for determining whether a game is alive or not is how LONG it takes to get a game going not the number of games sitting there open).
But in the next 60 days or so, Demigod will reach that balance point where the # of people coming into the community will equal the number of people leaving. At that point, the 8 things I mention above have to be met or else the community will start to shrink.
Items 1 and 2 are the ones that worry me the most. The production values GPG put into the demigods is significant. One thing that's nice about LoL is that the production values on its heroes are much lower.
I dont' think we need/want 30+ demigods. But I do think we need a reasonably consistent stream of demigods and/or maps to keep things growing and moving.
