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
Related articles:
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 as a new Stardock customer that has been a very happy steam customer I say so far so good. And I hope a little upstart company gives Impulse a run for it's money just to keep you all competative.
I doubt there is a single gamer out there who can successfully argue that having both Steam and Impulse is worse than either or none. I still prefer Steam for two reasons. Programs installed to Steam will survive an OS crash and can be transferred to any other Steam install by dragging over a single folder. Currently Impulse is not capable of this, but it would be nice to see something to that effect in the future. The second reason is that simply put, all my friends are already on Steam. I actually added Sins to the Steam launcher so that I could use the overlay and chat features with my existing set of contacts.
In my mind nothing bad can come of a little competition. While Steam might be a shooting star, you have to remember that even the brightest star will eventually fall to earth and become a cold rock if it doesn't have a reason to fly ever higher.
I personally like impulse's power to let me play my games when the net is down. When I have an outage in my area, it makes me cry because I have to find something to do that isn't playing a game online, stream movies from netflix, browse wikipedia, troll forum.elementalgame.com, or find new music videos. Thanks to impulse being not-stream, I can at least play offline games I already have downloaded.
Hopefully Impulse and Gamersgate (now client free) will force Steam to fix its pitiful offline mode. Gamersgate and Impulse should target the European market (lots of PC gamers there) since Valve decided to screw them over with the euro = dollar pricing scheme.I agree: competition is good for the consumer.Steamworks is just a way of distributing a storefront to millions of PCs, which kinda sucks. I liked it better when Steam was a choice (except for Valve games). But even if you buy a Steamworks game at retail, you'll still have to use the Steam client (which is good for those who'd use Steam in the first place [retail is usually cheaper] but bad for those who don't care for it).
Under no circumstance would I want just one supplier of online games. Not only would it be extremely bad for gamers, it would also be catastrophic for producers.
Stuff like this is what happens when you "dedicate" yourself to one service. You lose sight of the customer.
I'm all for competition Brad, but the only thing I see with Steamworks is that they're trying to solidify their piece of the market share.
This is a serious question and not a "jab" at you. If there was a new skinning application that was cheaper (since it' would be the new guy on the block) and can use windowblinds formatted skins, would you allow that to continue or would you try to change the format in a way that makes it more difficult for the new application to use windowblinds skin in order to maintain your market share?
That's really not a valid analogy.
There's nothing stopping someone from making a skinning application (there are other skinning applications) to compete with say WindowBlinds.
I'm not a fan of the on-line distribution/control schemes, whether it be Steam, Impulse, or something else. That being said, I broke down and installed Steam solely to play Mass Effect when it finally appeared without that idiotic DRM attached to it. (Of course, Steam is DRM is its own right).
I have to say, after using it for MEPC, I really dislike Steam. In fact, I pretty much hate it. I don't mind Impulse though, but it's still a DRM scheme in my mind as well, although it's a damned sight better than Steam as far as I'm concerned. I think in the not too distant future, as Stardock keeps inmproving Impulse and gets more publishers and games on board, it will likely have a good shot at giving Steam a serious run for the money.
Competition and choice for the consumer is, indeed, a great thing.
Sure it is - Archive the games and put them on a seperate drive. If you have a crash, you re-install them by unpacking the archive.
Ah, yeah, I mean, I would assume there would be their own format too. But imo, a major way to make a small dent in the skinning marketplace would be to make it compatible with Windowblinds skins since Windowblinds has the largest amount of content out there by far (from what I can see. And I'm a windowblinds user). Which is why I'm asking if an application did provide that kind of compatibility, I'd imagine it would be natural for Stardock to make changes to keep SD's piece of the market share and not let the new guy come in and take away a piece of the pie. Which one way would amount to making it more difficult or impossible for another program to use windowblinds's format.
Basically, what I'm saying is I see what Steam is doing is trying to get a foothold on their marketshare (not necessarily stopping new digital content providers from coming in but adding proprietary features to prevent people from switching to another) and I'd imagine that you would do the same Brad in the skinning arena. If I'm wrong, then I think you are a really swell nice guy (and I mean that genuinely and not as sarcasm).
On a separate note, I'm a windowsblinds user and I was under the impression that SD pretty much owns the entire market share on skinning for windows (while still keeping your prices pretty reasonable). The only other skinning apps I've seen are the horrible buggy dll hacking.
I have both Steam and Impulse on my computer, and I have to say I greatly prefer Impulse. I currently live in South Korea, but all of my banking info (PayPal account, CC, etc...) has my residence in Canada. Steam does not let me purchase games in their store because I am in one place and my money comes from another. Impulse does. Win for Impulse.
my nintendo Wii has that problem too. Nintendo for the lose!
(bare in mind, I love* nintendo. Until recently when they got on this region-locking kick am I upset with them. They used to try their hardest to give US and europe what they could to compare with all the perks the Japanese get. So they stood for free-world gaming to me. But now my japanese DS won't even talk to my english wii, when the games in question are designed to be compatible. again, modern nintendo for the lose)
Honestly I love Impulse philosophy more, but still I think Steam at this moment is slightly better.
I have to agree with Frogboy about monopoly risks, anyway.
Even if I think wich your true "rising enemy" is Game for Windows Live, wich really sucks.
I have Steam and Impulse Installed. I own, according to my steam profile, 48 games for the service. While on Impulse I only have Sins of a Solar Empire and its expansion, and Galactic Civ 2 and its expansions. I already have Supreme Commander from retail, and theres just no other games from Impulse that I want to play. On the other hand, Steam is coming out with so many new games recently that I can't live without it. I totally prefer Steamworks DRM method to the one EA used which have limited activations. And its much more user friendly than CD checks.
Bad experience with the EA securom. I've had to call EA support 3 different times for various games that used up all of their activations arbitrarily from hardware upgrades. Funny enough, Spore wasn't one of them because I never tried to play it after my upgrade because it just sucks ass.
I was disapointed last year when I had to install third party software(impulse) when I installed Sins for the first time. Since then I have grown to accept it and like the feature to update my games rather easily, but not not force them automatically like steam does. Right now though I have grown to trust both Steam and Impulse. I've had nothing but positive experiences with both.
I've been a Steam user since before Half-Life 2 came out. Preloaded it a month in advance.
Personally, if I could buy all my games on Impulse I would. I have used Steam, Gamers Gate, direct2drive, and a few others... In my mind the flexibility and non-intrusive nature of Impulse makes it the best option.
I don't hate Steam, but I find that Impulse is a much better fit for my style of gaming and software purchasing.
The bonus to all this is I get to support a software publisher/developer that makes games that I enjoy.
Not quite. If you drag the steamapps folder to another installation of steam your programs will function normally 100% intact. All of them. Steam will simply check them for updates once and off you go. Your settings, mods and such will all be transferred at the same time. Pretty much the only thing you can lose is the savegame files for third party games which are stored outside the steamapps folder.
With impulse backups must be made seperately and stored externally. And even then if your computer crashes you must reinstall everything all over again to get your games back. As well impulse does not have file defragmentation and the file integrity support is less streamlined.
Nothing wrong with it at all, but there is more room for improvement.
Compare the two screenshots - one is efficient and organized, with an absolute minimum of clutter. The other has... stuff everywhere and mac-ripoff visuals. It's got a mysterious blue button that most people don't even realize is a button, and yet it contains the most important controls.
I like Impulse, and I like Steam, they're both good. But here's the thing: Impulse is backed by a company that designs skinning software (which is rapidly becoming obsolete) and has two (relatively minor, however excellent) game franchises to its name: One a TBS, which is just slightly ahead of text adventures in terms of popularity, and one an RTS, which if current trends continue will always be second (at best) to shooters.
Steam is backed by a company that makes games - Half Life, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress, Portal, Counter-Strike. These games are basically the best PC FPSs on the market, hands down. Valve has never made a bad game, and neither has Stardock, but in Valve's case, that's really saying something. If Valve makes a game, it's an instant best-seller. Stardock has ONE game title they made themselves, and ONE they bought the rights to as it was in publisher limbo, and likely had very little influence on the finished product.
I'm not saying Stardock's a bad company or a weak company, or that Impulse is a bad product, but in terms of stability... I would've paid more and bought that game off Steam, to be honest. I know that 10 years from now, Steam will most likely still be around. Impulse....? Let's face it, if Stardock makes one major mistake, it will be in seriously bad shape. When they've just announced that they're publishing a strategy game of seriously dubious merits (Demigod) and are making an original title of a type that they've never even attempted before and which the market is flooded with... Come on. Give me something to be positive about.
Let's get right down to it: Aside from GC2 and SoaSE, there is almost nothing at all of any value to be found on Impulse. There's World of Goo - but I've got the superior Wii version. There are probably some diamonds in the rough, like Space Rangers. But by and large, you have a collection of crap nobody wants, padding the game list to make it appear that you are bigger than you are.
Again, I like Impulse, and I would gladly favor it over Steam if I had a little more confidence in its future, and I definitely understand why allowing Steam to be a monopoly would be a bad thing. But... I, as a single person, can't do anything to help Impulse get to where it needs to be.
"just announced" something on the order of a year ago that they were going to publish Demigod (on the order of, not "a year ago" but "on the order of" -- I don't remember the exact date, but it was a long whiles back). "Dubious merits" -- on a game you've probably never played, because I've been enjoying the beta since I got my hot little hands on it. "Original title of a type they've never even attempted before adn which the market is flooded with." I'm going to guess you're talking about Elemental... which is Turn-based Strategy, a type of game SD has lots of experiance with, and fantasy based (which is not something the market is 'flooded with'.
Being conservative is one thing -- and it's good -- coming up with false points just to denegrate one of the very few good publishers out there is just absurd. SD is 'winning' by focusing on quality, just like Blizzard has done before them. Only, unlike Blizzard, SD has consistently shown it's willing to adapt and grow it's products to be better, both by incorporating new ideas (moving from the 'build everything' approach of GalCiv to the limited space approach of GCII) and, though I have no real evidence of this (it's all circumstancial), I honestly believe they are looking at what others are doing right and incorporating that
As for me, I have not used Steam. I still down deep remember when it had a bad reputation and my subconscious is suspicious of it.
But there is already competition other than Steam and lots of it. Search for "download games" in a search engine.
Good Old Games www.gog.com has interesting PC classics for download, lots and lots of them. Many of these good for NetBooks, but that market is not going to become huge before the second or third generation of Netbooks. Still, it is a niche that nobody is yet addressing as far as I can tell.
direct2drive, probably more and more sites coming. Linux and Macintosh sites as well.
So... are you a Impulse fanboy?
Interresting you say that. In the early 90's I was a fanboy of Microsoft software. MS Word 2.0 was so much better than Wordperfect, I did recommend it to everyone. But I was a happy OS/2 user too and I am really bitter what Microsoft did ever since. It is not fanboys that have ascended Microsoft to power, but abuse of their monopoly power.
You remember the first anti-trust case? Not the one about Netscape bundling, the one before that. If an OEM sold you a processor they had to sell you MS-DOS. That's why everyone thought MS-DOS was free and were unwilling to pay for something else, like OS/2. Microsoft lost the anti-trust case, and for a while retailer chains like Vobis sold PC's with OS/2 Warp pre-installed. But it was too late. Microsoft's pre-installation monopoly came already with strong dependencies of many vendors on the Windows API, hardware vendors had already invested in Windows drivers, not OS/2 driver and consumers had applications that under Windows, it was a lost cause. IBM did need a lot more to competing with Microsoft than just the lower price it could offer shops like Vobis. It was unable to solve the software and driver crisis.
That, and not fanboys, is why we today use Windows. I am still totally awed by the economic damage that was done. Direct, by paying too much for software, and indirect, by having unstable crashing operating systems like Windows 95.
Now about Impulse. The problem I have with it is that you totally sold yourself to the devil. It is built on .NET, Internet Explorer, you name it. There is no technical reason why that makes sense. As you can see for yourself, Impulse is a slow, memory eating application that causes nothing but grief by people that for example use Windows 2000, Wine, or whatever. That means that by feeding you with money, I worsen the Microsoft monopoly problem.
The reason why I do feed you with money, and even recommend Impulse on various forums is for two reasons: One being that the Microsoft monopoly is currently a lesser problem than the DRM problem and also succesfully taken care of by competition from Apple and Linux vendors. The other being is that, unlike other publishers, you have not fallen for the "what FPS or RTS can we use this year to milk money" in the gaming industry and actually make games that I like. Good games, for a good price, without the usual annoyances. That deserves support and I am happy to pay for those games and play a bit Stardock fanboy here and there.
That does not mean I endorse Impulse, it is part of the problems of this world. Regardless wether the rumors it'll appear on Linux are true, Steam is not an application that helps to build the next generation Microsoft monopoly, Impulse is.
Steam unfortunately is part of the DRM problem, Impulse is not.
If I was wrong in my assumption brad and you would not intentionally change the format of windowblinds skins to make it more difficult to be reverse engineered and used by a competitor, please correct me.
The basic idea of my analogy seems correct to me. But if you genuinely wouldn't make intentional changes in say windowblinds skin format in the hypothetical scenario I mention, then I would be wrong about Stardock being totally the same as valve and it'd be obvious you are more in this to make cool software (like windowblinds) and the money (and market share) must really be a distant second.
(would edit my original post instead but it says "bad auth")
Only thing I prefer on Steam over Impulse is GUI...
They successfully managed to get away from HORRIBLE Windows looks wrapping it up in "smooth" monochrome coating - love it!
Impulse, quite frankly, is in desperate need of graphics designer to sharpen as well as smooth it up and down...
Otherwise - long live Impulse if you ask me
Here's my honest opinion on the subject- which may not sit well here.
I think that in order to compete with Steam, Valve is going to have to massively screw up, or Stardock is going to have to buy or merge with of the other Steam competitors (Gamersgate is the most likely and sensible acquisition here) That said, I'm not worried about Impulse going away- at a bare minimum, it will be profitable for Stardock to do with Stardock Games and Desktop apps, therefore it should remain profitable- which is the minimal goal.
Right now, the deals are great, but how long until a price war starts that is going to ruin profitability? There's also the looming ogre of bandwidth caps from ISPs to deal with.
I agree with Brad's point- last night before I saw this I made a post saying the exact same thing on another forum.
I agree that Steam and Steamworks are 90% DRM as well- the only reason I put up with it period and even have Steam on my comp is due to TF2 being awesome. If Stardock made a better TF2, and it had a viable playerbase, I'd dump Steam like a bad habit.
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