Kudos to Stardock for treating me like an honest customer. As of this evening, they’ve refunded my purchase price for Demigod, which I’ve now uninstalled.

I’ll cop to this mis-understanding between Stardock and me being mostly my fault. I got caught up in the hype of the new release, combined with some very rich and interesting backstory material I read, and jumped to the conclusion that this was more of an RPG than it is.

Here’s the first part of the blurbage on the ImpulseDriven (I bought the digital version) site:

The all father has vanished, creating an opening in the pantheon. To fill the void, Demigods from across from the mortal world must wage war against one another in a bid to ascend to true godhood.

Demigod is a real-time, tactical strategy game that includes extensive role-playing elements. Choose from several Demigods, each poised for battle with their own unique capabilities and awe-inspiring powers. Vanquish other would-be gods as you gain levels, increase in power, unlock the power of mystic artifacts and slowly battle your way closer to joining the Pantheon.

To me, fan of strategy-RPG games, “tactical strategy” + “extensive role-playing elements” = something like Final Fantasy Tactics, only this one would have a way of doing multiplayer skirmishes with other players in addition to the singleplayer strategy-RPG game. Not something I’d be interested in, I detest competitive multiplayer gaming. I’d rather spend an afternoon in the dentist’s chair.

I was assuming, and assuming wrongly, and in addition being hasty (farther down the same page the genre is clearly marked as “Strategy”). What Demigod really offers is a game that feels like Unreal Tournament or Quake Wars: a series of ‘matches’ played in arenas, complete with an announcer. Only in RTS form rather than FPS.

There’s nothing at all wrong with that, but it just isn’t something I personally am interested in.

*Most* PC game companies would’ve told me “Tough cookies, we have your cash.” but I was hoping given that I bought the game from Impulse and requested a refund within an hour of completing the download and installation (as soon as I booted it up and saw the kind of game it was, I know it wasn’t for me), that they’d do the right thing. (I’m assuming the Impulse launcher phones home whenever I fire up the game, so they could see I hadn’t played it much, and down the road can see that I’m not playing it).

And they did.

And in doing so, they’ve gained a loyal customer who, going forward, will shop with confidence (albeit after doing more research next time!) from Stardock and Impulse.

So thank you, Stardock, for treating me like the honest customer I am. Most PC gaming companies treat gamers like a bunch of thieves. You’ve shown yourself to be different. Kudos!