The good news is that Demigod is proving to be extremely popular with close to 120,000 people logging onto their servers to battle it out online. The bad news, though, is that according to Stardock’s status reports, only 18,000 of these gamers have actually purchased the software.

Once again proving that no good deed goes unpunished, despite their valiant efforts to ensure that the game was running smoothly in time for its (early) launch, Stardock is reporting that their latest title Demigod has been pirated through Torrent clients an estimated 100,000 times. According to statistics logged by most popular peer-to-peer file sharing sites, a disc image of Demigod was leaked on the internet around two days before its official launch date on April 14.

Several days before Demigod was supposed to go on sale, Gamestop violated the game’s street date and began selling retail copies early. Whether or not this contributed to the full game being made available so early is unknown.

In the past, Stardock has been a staunch proponent of not implementing DRM like SecuROM into their games. The controversial SecuROM has become infamous amongst gamers for its tendency to limit the amount of times a game can be installed on a PC.

This is not the first time that the launch of a Stardock title has suffered because of piracy. One of their previous titles, World of Goo, was reported by its designer Ron Carmel as having a 90% piracy rate. However, Carmel also mentioned that other titles which were protected by DRM also had similar piracy rates. Most notably, Electronic Art’s SPORE was sold with SecuROM on the disc, but it was one of the most pirated games in history.