Stardock boss Brad Wardell says gamers currently playing pirated versions of his action RPG Demigod are thieves

“Demigod is heavily pirated,” wrote Wardell on his blog. “And make no mistake, piracy pisses me off.”

“If you’re playing a pirated copy right now, if you’re one of those people on Hamachi or GameRanger playing a pirated copy and have been for more than a few days, then you should either buy it or accept that you’re a thief and quit rationalising it any other way.”

When Demigod launched last month the servers were crippled by an unexpected surge of users who had pirated the game.

Stardock had designed Demigod's infrastructure to handle 50,000 connections, but on launch day 140,000 users tried connecting.

According to Wardell only 18,000 of these users had validated copies of the game.   

[Via VG247]