One of the things I routinely see on-line when they hear about something new about Impulse is someone commenting “I wish they’d all just consolidate under Steam.” In fact, as Impulse has become increasingly successful, the cry has gotten louder.
So strong is Steam’s fan base at this point that one of the most common comments about Impulse on third-party forums is the desire by some that it didn’t exist and that everything was just on Steam.
I admire Valve on two levels. First, I admire their excellence in what they make. I like companies that strive for the highest quality possible in what they produce. Second, I admire Valve’s business practices. They are incredibly effective, competent, and adaptive. In short, Valve is a fantastic company.
I’m a professional zealot. My tendency to get behind the best technology has led me to be, at various times, an OS/2 zealot, an OpenDoc zealot, and yes, even a Valve zealot (Source engine).
But I’ve also been around long enough to know that you don’t want one player calling all the shots. The companies we love today may not be so loved later on.
People routinely give me a hard time because I like Electronic Arts a lot. How is that possible? Because to me, when I think of Electronic Arts I think of Archon, MULE, Seven Cities of Gold, Starflight, and Summer Games.
When I was an OS/2 zealot, the up and coming star was Microsoft. Its fans helped ensure that Windows, not OS/2, became the standard OS. For many people today, it’s hard to imagine Microsoft as the fanboy favorite – the company that could do no wrong – the company that would never do anything “evil”.
Now, we live in an industry absolutely dominated by Microsoft and Electronic Arts. Its fanboys got their way. Is there anything wrong with that? You tell me.
Today, the pattern repeats itself. Steam is doing phenomenally well. It has fans that actively wish that competition would just go away in the name of “standards” (whatever that means).
And yet, even though Impulse is just an up-and-comer, the competition has already helped consumers. Before the “Impulse Weekend Buys” it was relatively rare to see regular organized major sales on Steam. Now we get them every weekend.
I would like to think that we’ve had some impact on people’s awareness that you don’t need nasty DRM to be successful.
I think Impulse’s focus on trying to encourage one price, worldwide in local currency right out of the gate has made some impact too.
I think Impulse's very fast download speeds have helped encourage competing services to keep increasing their bandwidth capacity.
At the very least, Impulse’s growing success, I think, is something most people can agree has been very beneficial to consumers.
Steam’s most successful venture yet, Steamworks, has helped Steam get an increasingly firmer hold on the market. In my opinion, Steamworks is 90% copy protection, 10% game-related features. I know that publishers are looking at Steamworks as a replacement to SecuROM for protecting games.
The problem is that Steamworks requires the user to have a Steam account and Steam installed to use it – even if you buy it at retail or through a third party like Direct2Drive. I think that’s the basic strategy for Steamworks -- give developers a bunch of “free” features that they used to have to pay for (copy protection, DRM, GameSpy type stuff) with the only catch is that the user has to become a Steam user and have Steam installed. As a result, something like Dawn of War 2, for instance, won’t be on Impulse.
Even with the case of Steamworks, competition has helped here too though, since Stardock is producing Impulse Reactor to compete with Steamworks. Impulse Reactor doesn’t require Impulse (the client) to even be installed to work.
Steamworks, obviously, has a head start and publishers have been following THQ’s lead by setting up with Steamworks even when it means they’re distributing a third party store with their game. After all, right now, Steam has the numbers.
Based on the #s I hear from publishers, Impulse, which has only been out for 6 months, has already become #2 in terms of actual units sold on a given title. But Steam still has a massive lead. Obviously, if we can’t even carry certain big name titles because they've hooked in Steamworks, the competitive trend will reverse.
And while some people might very much like seeing there be only one option, especially if that option comes from such a cool company like Valve, they may not be considering the long term ramifications.
For example, last weekend, Steam and Impulse both had sales on Titan Quest. Steam had it for $7.99, Impulse had it for $3.99. Neither I assume knew the other was going to have a sale on it. But that sort of competition is good for consumers.
Competition is good for consumers. It’s also good for companies. I’m a Steam user. I enjoy watching it evolve and improve over time. But I am also thankful that there are still alternatives to it. Because as much as people love Valve today, I still remember how much everyone loved EA and Microsoft in their day too. Competition keeps companies dynamic and consumer friendly.
Update:
Reading through the comments I see some people turning it into an Impulse vs. Steam discussion (i.e. Impulse rulez! No, Steam rockz!).
This isn't mean as a Steam vs. Impulse discussion. What it is supposed to be is to make people aware of the long history in which fans have rooted for the up-and-comer (whether it be EA in its day or Microsoft later and Google today) and how perceptions change when said companies dominate.
There are plenty of people out there that with that everything would just "standardize" on iPods and iTunes. And even as an iPod and iTunes user, I am glad there's Amazon.com selling MP3s.
For the record, I use Steam every day. I like it a lot. The question isn't which is better (right now, if I had to choose one client, I'd use Steam because of its superior community features and game library -- how many CEOs would say that publicly about the "competition"?). The objective is to remind users that competition is always a good thing even when you love a particular vendor (whether it be Valve, Stardock, whoever).
It's never a good idea to explicitly wish for a single source. Some people in the comments area have said "Of course no one wants a monopoly". But I can assure them that yes, there are lots of people and companies who would like just that because a single source is seen to streamline things.
We expect Impulse to exceed 1 million users before Demigod even ships. So suffice to say, it is doing well. It's nowhere near Steam's user base but then again, Impulse has only been out 6 months.
The point is, Impulse's existence and success shouldn't be seen as an "inconvenience" to consumers but rather as a way to ensure that consumers continue to have choices.
Steam and Impulse at a glance:
www.steampowered.com
www.impulsedriven.com
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Stardock mentioned by name by the Michigan governor in the state of the State address
Impulse Phase 3 preview
Stardock prepares to open up second game studio
Stardock's Sins of a Solar Empire top selling PC strategy game of 2008
Well, I think this is my point: I'm not aware of any traditional monopoly having benefits for the consumer.
Hm. Well, if by "black market," you mean pirating, yes, that will always be something of a factor, atlhough again I see litlte benefit to the average consumer in the emergence of black markets.
On the other hand, I don't see it as being unrealistic that we could reach a point where an oligopoly is a reality, which would be the same for practical purposes. I think Frogboy's point is that if we want a world where Steam is the primary digital distribution channel with no serious competition, it could happen. I think it is a possibility. He thinks that's a bad thing. I'm inclined to agree.
While it's fans helped, I guess you could say, the nail that drove MS into the spotlight was the gov't's decision to choose them as the OS of choice when it decided to standardize it's systems. Of course any one that was there back in the stone-age of personal computing never had a very high opinion of the Great Gates because of his shameless appropriation of apps that were in the public domain and his ruthless legal actions against any one who opposed him. At least that's my humble opinion and recollection...
Black markets (not the same as piracy, although piracy is a form of a black market where information is traded for information in the Scene) benefits customers because they sell products without permission to a lower price, thus counter-acting the negative impacts of monopolistic companies choking the supply.
Here are a couple of examples of monopolies benefiting customers:
1) An old Swedish (government) company owned the copper lines, limiting ADSL products to certain companies. This slowed the spread of ADSL in the country, and raised prices. However, because Telia was goverment owned, it also had a benefit: it ensured that the copper lines were maintained where it was not profitable to do so (outside cities). Does it apply to digital goods? No. Noone owns the internet, and bandwidth has price points set by market forces.
2) Sweden to this day has a government monopoly on alcohol sold to private customers outside bars and restaurants (in other words - liquor stores). Even though it raises prices and reduces the perceived customer happiness, it also has positive effects by reducing alcohol-related diseases (the bill is paid by tax payers). Does it apply to digital goods? No. Digital goods do not need to be limited because they aren't inherently dangerous even in large amounts.
3) A certain south-east Asian government enforced a price ceiling below the market salary on factory workers in the country for certain industries (ie - they forcibly reduced worker pay). The government used its monopolistic situation on the labour market to reduce costs for its customers (the companies who benefited from the paycuts). Although the price ceiling was lifted in time, the monopoly ended up not only benefiting the customers (the companies) but also the workers and thus the country. The country profiled itself as a leader in technology and today has one of the highest GDPs per capita in the world, even higher than the US. The country, of course, is Singapore. Does it apply to digital goods? No. Suppliers do not directly control producer salary across the globe.
Edit: I see it as fundamentally unrealistic that the current digital goods market will create an oligopoly or merge into a monopoly. The entry costs are extremely small, the dominant companies would have no way to enforce their claim on the market. Even in cases where a game is sold exclusively by one company supplying digital goods, abusing its position to claim a higher price than it would in a free market, black markets have emerged to even the numbers. Example: Wow+2 exansions, sold online only by Blizzard or D2D in the US. Cd-keys sold illegaly at 60% of Blizzard's price.
It is hard to not to compare impulse and steam, when for the next short while, the only thing that really can compete well with Steam is impulse. This is not to say that it will ultimately devolved into one vs. the other. But rather, what features that impulse has while steam don't and vice versa.
It might be better if impulse acts as a compliment to steam. Hence there can be healthy competition. Who knows, it might be like coca cola and pepsi, the only two dominating players in the soft drink industry. People might counter that there should be more than 2 choices but then...having 2 is better than just having one.
I personally would like to see more simulation type games on impulse, i am disappointed that there are no racing or flight sims offered on impulse but it is being offered on steam. I would rather much buy it from impulse and steam.
The biggest reason for that is after downloading the game, and installing it, i don't have to boot up impulse to run the game, but with steam, it automatically boots up as soon as i start the game which i download it from. See, i don't mind if it just boots up, but there is the issue of whether my game will work when steam is in offline mode. It is a very inconvenient thing.
And i said it before, with impulse, you get to access the people of the developers that are involved with impulse/SD as a publisher via the chat features. With Steam, the truth of the matter is, i hardly use the community features, truth be told, i don't care about it that much. Why?? simple, it is know that steam/valve acts as a digital distributor of games for various publishers, I don't know the amount of vested interested they have towards regular steam users, be it they use the community feature or not. But with SD, it is known that they keep regular and healthy relationships with impulse users on their various forums as a way to get feedback to how well impulse is doing in terms of serving their potential and existing customer base.
So what does impulse need right now, well more selection of games, who cares if impulse offers it, and steam also does, I as a customer would really like just to use impulse if i have to. Because my personal preference is impulse, yes, i use steam, do i think it is worse or better than impulse?? the answer to that is NO. But as preference, i like impulse better.
One last thing, it would be good, if SD put out full pages ad on various gaming mags on a regular basis to people that there are alternative to steam. and who cares if valve doesn't like it. In the world of business, the laws of capitalism is no different than the laws of evolution, it is survival of the fittest or the one that can have the most market shares.
You seem to be forgetting that Valve got its first few million Steam users by buying out CounterStrike and making Steam mandatory for CS players.
Brad has turned down buyout offers in the past, and has said time and again he'll continue to refuse them because he'd rather retain control and freedom. Things like our long-term patching policy would never fly at a publicly traded company.
It's amazing how short the memories some people have.
Steam isn't #1 because people chose Steam. Steam is #1 because Counterstrike became a phenonenon, a game Valve didn't make, Valve bought the game and then forced players to install Steam to continue to play it. That gave them an instant million plus user base.
Steam is where it is because they forced people to use it in the beginning. Steam provided no added benefit to Counterstrike players.
Stardock is using a similar tactic with Impulse with its own customers. The difference is that Steamers apply a double standard.
From what I've read, now I'll have to install Steam if I want to play Dawn of War 2.
In the end, I'm all in favor of competition. I just wish these games/systems would become Apple/Linux friendly. The new up comer helping the new up comers.
I'm not one to get too involved with online forums/communities and what not, it's just not my style (I think I have one post here), but I have always followed and held the deepest amount of respect for Stardock. Brad, your post has elevated my respect for you and the company to a whole new level. I hope you continue to turn down buyout offers. Un-financially stifled creativity is all but lost in the games industry. Everyone has to make money to continue making products, that's just the way the world works, but it is extremely refreshing to have a company that is not completely inhibited by cash money. I'm certainly going to give Impulse more attention in the future, as I think online distribution/packaging is where the PC games industry is headed. We definitely do NOT want there to be only one option, as great as Steam is (for now at least). Keep up the good work! Start hiring writers! I'm from Ann Arbor! Ahh!
I'm not one to get too involved with online forums/communities and what not, it's just not my style (I think I have one post here), but I have always followed and held the deepest amount of respect for Stardock. Brad, your post has elevated my respect for you and the company to a whole new level. I hope you continue to turn down buyout offers. Un-financially stifled creativity is all but lost in the games industry. Everyone has to make money to continue making products, that's just the way the world works, but it is extremely refreshing to have a company that is not completely inhibited by cash money.
I'm certainly going to give Impulse more attention in the future, as I think online distribution/packaging is where the PC games industry is headed. We definitely do NOT want there to be only one option, as great as Steam is (for now at least). Keep up the good work! Start hiring writers! I'm from Ann Arbor! Ahh!
Yes, Steam got it's first "customers" by forcing them to go to Steam. No, Steam did not provide "no added benefit". Infact, one of the reasons cited for the CS change was being able to implement a more functional anti-cheat tool (VAC). Cheating was one of the most rampant problems for CS and the Steam switch all but completely fixed it.
And what double standard would that be? Both Steam and Impulse force customers to use the respective services by making them mandatory for certain in-house games.
The double standard is when Steam users bitch that they have to use Impulse to update their Stardock game while giving Valve a pass on forcing them to use Steam.
I don't have a problem with Steam. I have a problem with the lunatics who scream that Steam is like Highlander where there can and should only be one.
Steam got to where it is today because Valve shoved it down the CS community pure and simple and made it load itself on start up (where it conveniently forgets that setting when it updates itself). It's not like Steam came out and people chose Steam because of how great Steam was.
Steam now is a lot better. But thank goodness it's not the only choice.
I'm fully aware of the situation. That is one thing I really like about Brad; he is not obsessed with abject greed like so many other people. I was simply agreeing on the possibility aspect nothing more. For example it would be kind interesting to see what would transpire if Mr. Gates seriously sat down with Brad and slid him a blank check and said "go ahead, make my day".
X-Box Live, is not a comparrison. That's software built for a propritary console, so that I can understand, and accept. If you don't like X-Box Live, go get a Playstation with PSN or something. A PC has no OS provided game center, so there should be choice.
Even Microsoft didn't make their service a hassle, GFW Live is nice, and stays out of the way. Sure it's not as good as X-Box Live yet, but it's doing quite well. At least it only runs when I'm running the game, and it makes sense. DoWII uses their servers, matchmaking service, chat features, etc, they don't use Steam for anything, and yet Steam has to be installed and running with me signed in, in order to use a game that doesn't use it for anything.
That is the crunch right there. Dawn of War barely uses the Steam overlay. If I want to play with friends I have to get them all on my GFWL overlay now.
I bought Empire: Total War retail. The game won't run unless I have Steam and validated it online.
DoW 2 only uses Steam for nothing if you count patching as "nothing".
Then I could complain about Impulse users who condemn Steam yet give Stardock a pass on forcing them to use Impulse. There is no double standard - the services are equal.
But Impulse doesn't force you to start it whenever you want to play your game, only when you want to update it. There are more differences, of course. And some of them aren't favourable to Impulse, but for me that's an important point. Still, i wish we could get rid of that "Need an internet connection" crap. Really annoying even if i have one. What happens if i want to install it in a non-connected computer?
And as someone pointed put, Impulse offers more than just games.
I like both AND I like pie.
Well, you can't have all three!
But...but...i like pie. Ok i'll take cake.
Well, then the problem is solved. Steam doesn't force you to be online. It did when it was in it's intial phase, but by now that's long gone.
The holy-grail of DRM is absolute ubiquity. That is, every device capable of playing the DRM'd content is fully capable of detecting the person playing the content, and can thus transparently authenticate the content without any real knowledge by the person using it. Or, from the user's perspective, they can put the content on any device that can execute it without restriction.
Steam provides that. The more Steam gets used, the more ubiquitous Steam is. The more ubiquitous Steam is, the more people are able to move content from device to device without (apparent) restrictions, because the only actual restriction is Steam, which is already there.
Does Impulse provide this value to both player and developer? No.
And you can't win this fight without both players and developers on your side. StarDock has lost this fight.
Oh, Impulse will go on. It may even be a good application downloader. Some game developers, particularly indies that Valve might ignore, will throw their games on Impulse. And of course, StarDock's games will be there. But that's about it.
So the question of whether we want Steam to be the only option is fairly irrelevant. That battle is over; the only question is how much they will run up the score.
Now, is this something that people would want? Well, sort-of. I don't in general like the idea of a monopoly, but Steam is really no less monopolistic than console games. There, the console maker decides many things about how you have to develop for the platform, putting specific restrictions on what games have to do.
At the same time, if Valve needs a competitor, I'd rather it not be Impulse. I mean, let's face facts here: Impluse is not a difficult program to write and maintain. These are solved problems; websites do this stuff all the time. Yet SD has made significant mistakes in their implementation of this system.
Sure, version 1 of Steam had lots of problems too. But this isn't 2004 anymore; StarDock needs to be doing it better than the competition. Everything about how Impluse has been implemented suggests to me that it is something that was rushed, lacks clear vision, and is ultimately not a good product. It is simply not a well-executed product.
And you need good execution to catch up to Valve.
Anyways, refering to what you quoted, unless it has changed lately, you must run the Steam client first to be able to play the game (even if it's in Offline mode), while with Impulse I only run it whenever I want to check for updates or check the store.
Refering to what you comment, i'm not sure about how the offline mode works exactly because i haven't tried it but I have heard it requires you to be online first. Doesn't sound quite right as somehow it defeats the purpose of installing/playing a game without internet connection in the machine, so maybe I heard some wrong information about it.
Technically, you are not "running" Steam; it runs itself. It's just a start-up process that's always there. You do have to tell it to go into online mode, but that's about it.
The holy grail and the Achilles' heel. It's a single point of failure: If whoever is in charge of the DRM stops supporting it, you're left with a lot of useless content and software.
In addition, that level of transparency has never been shown to be feasible. It would require a level of market saturation close to 100% - it would have to rival iTunes. That's simply not realistic.
In addition, DRM tends to ignore laws and is often very inflexible. What happens when the copyright expires? What happens if the customer's computer is destroyed and the customer has to buy a new one? What happens if the developers go bankrupt? What happens if the nation decides to change copyright laws?
And of course, what about compatibility with legacy devices that were created before the DRM? New hardware is needed for future DRM - will customers be punished for having incompatible devices?
. . . and you can you make absolutely sure it's ubiquitous? How do you convince everybody to adopt it? What about people who are philisophically against DRM? How about people who want to treat products as ownership rather than licensing? How do you handle all of the IP laws of different countries? What if a significant nation decides it doesn't want DRM?
. . . and don't forget the technological barriers! The current PC architecture is a very open architecture - there's very little memory protection on PCs. Effective DRM will require decryption, and both the decryption routine and the decrypted data will need some type of protection. If you can't protect the decryption code and the decrypted data, you have little hope of thwarting hackers. Right now, DRM doesn't just not work - it can't work because of the way PCs work.
And of course the question that really needs an answer - how many customers really want DRM? Who is demanding it? Is it really a win-win situation, or are the creators of DRM simply fooling themselves?
If it's without restriction, why bother with the DRM in the first place?
Problem is, websites aren't centeralized in any way, and they don't perform automatic updates on the software the user downloads. They're also extremely limited without plugins.
Feel free to share what you believe are shortcomings with the product.
Strange. I swear I had to go to the website and download, install, and run it. I didn't wake up one day and there it was.
. . . and oh, yeah - Steam starting when the computer boots is totally optional. An option I happen to have turned off.
. . . and technically, you never run any program if you really want to be that literal about the wording. The operating system loads and runs all software.
Then they can just redownload all their stuff. That's half the point of digital distribution, and is one of its greatest strengths.
If it couldn't be used on "legacy devices", then it wouldn't be ubiquitious, would it?
Um, Steam already is effective DRM, and it doesn't need specialized memory protection. Effective does not mean perfect.
The databases behind them are. And a particular website is centralized.
Everything that everyone has posted about. Every problem to download games they paid for. Every problem in authentication. Every annoyance in the UI.
A product with a smooth launch does not have this level of problem.
That may not be true for long, if what Brad is saying about developers partnering with Steam is true. New games may install Steam for you and require that you have a Steam account. That's what I'm talking about with regard to ubiquity; it's everywhere you want to be.
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