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
That's because they're not dominant at this point in time. Some people want them to be, and we've explained why that is a bad idea for everyone except steam.
Let's correct that a bit with facts: A user can buy Sins of a Solar Empire at the store and never mess with Impulse if they don't want. Yes that's correct. That same user will also not get any vital patches. Impulse integrated games force impulse on the user just as Steam integrated ones do for steam. The only difference is that the forced Impulse is (so far) arbitrary, while the Steam depedancy is a result of the game using steams architecture.
Left4Dead (and other Valve Source games) force steam because they were built using steam architecture (for online services, patching, DRM, etc.) - while Impulse forcing games (Sins, GalCiv2) force it after the fact - even switching to an Impulse enforcement halfway into the patching cycle.
I'm one of those people that would prefer convenience, but not at the price we currently have to pay for one-stop-shopping for digital distribution. (The price I refer to are inline with each of the points raised against non-competition in the initial topic post).
My dream digital distribution channel would provide the following features:
* Game installs that are duplicates of disk installs minus intrusive DRM (like gog.com). This is for compatibility with developer provided patches/updates and user-created mods and addons. I'd like to patch/update the same time a developer (or the user community) releases new patches or added content.
* Great selection of titles (like Steam).
* DRM-free, aside from net-based validation at install and during any patch/update process. (like most Impulse titles and all GOG titles). I don't like installable file systems, rootkit-like behavior demonstrated by hidden files and purposely malformed registry keys, resident programs or drivers, and other techniques used to bypass standard operating system function (unlike D2D and Steam and disc-based copy-protection).
* I'd like to be able to register on developer/publisher sites using keys obtained through the DD channel. (Impulse almost got this right the first time with The Witcher: Enhanced Edition). This provides for any added content or game forum specific added-value that might be available on developer/publisher sites. This also opens the door to license transfers between DD channel sites, and helps provide that level of convenience a one-stop-shopping paradigm would bring. But it may also bring about some of the negative aspects mentioned by in the top post.
I'd like to support companies that provide most or all of these points (and I do).
Is "architecture" a new euphuenism for DRM?
The only reason Steam is required when you buy a Valve game is because Valve games use Steam for their DRM. Stardock games don't ship with DRM so don't force users to use Impulse.
But those bastards at Stardock make you use Impulse to download free updates. The scum. Why can't they be like those heroes at Valve they put DRM on their games at retail and force me to use their clunky DRM client to make me connect my home machine to the Internet in order to play their game?
That it is a bad idea is an open door, monopolies are well known to be bad for everyone. I'm summing up the situation as I see it and luckily, quite some things need to happen before we get a bad games market. The market may be ill because of it's piracy/DRM issues, but it doesn't suffer from competition problems (yet).
It's good that Brad raises the point, and we consumers shall be very carefull not to create a monopolist.
Well, similarly, I hate the idea of loading software onto my computer for the sake of another piece of software. For that (admit it, bloatware) to run on my otherwire clean computer...
Impulse is just that little bugger off in the corner.
So is Steam.
Both are brilliant ideas of how to shove monitering and DRM down users' throats while still building up their fan base. Some will like it, some won't.
Many people, with their über, Cray, supercomputer, PG&E (West coast gets this), could give less of a care for a 20mb client (really exagerating here) running (but then... the install IS 20mb+, that doesn't just get "ignored"). But my laptop can barely run most games now, and would hate/loath to use my other (workstation) computer for anything but rendering.
But this is just me.
I hated Steam (a REAL dvd beats steam) and I hate Impulse.
I just tolerate Impulse more for the virtue of a smaller client, more openness??, possibility of getting Sins updates, and the near hope of seeing it die as updates get put INTO the game itself, where the update program belings!!!!!
EDIT: for the above "monopolist" post, you're right, but having just one seems so much easier then having to get off our collective rear ends and doing something. C'mon, work!?
Architecture refers to both the DRM (which is the decrypting of installed files, done once, upon first launch) and the fact that steam is the online play backend. Steam is effectively the Gamespy/Battle.net/Quazal of those games - you can't not install it, it's simply a functional part of the game.
You also seem to imply that you need to connect to Steam everytime you want to use their games - that is not the case. And yes, how incredibly charitable by Stardock to provide such incredibly gracious updates such as high-graphic settings. Truly that's something no other company would ever patch into a game after release. (mainly because it'd be included by default in any other game)
Well, this is pretty OT, but the update with the graphical enhancements was done to support users whose hardware can handle it (and also because Stardock/Ironclad continued to tweak the assets after release, which is something many companies won't do). Sins, like GalCiv2, was designed to run on a wide variety of machines, probably as wide a variety in the sense of graphical capabilities as any modern game.
I use both Impulse and Steam. I happens that my newest games are all on Impulse. Seeing competition in markets is very important to me. Steam has secured its place in the gaming world with its products and services. Impulse is innovative and carries its own business goals into the fray. This will make for an interesting battle in the years to come.
Take for example the look of the apps. The skins in Steam are mostly dark. Obviously they knew what they were doing because despite its drab appearance, the interface has a simplistic appeal to gamers. When Impulse showed up, they innovated on the dark styles being seen in Vista and Stream. The interface is dark, but easy to read and navigate all while being very pretty and modern.
My guess is that Impulse is coded fully in .NET where Steam is still stuck somewhere in the early part of the decade. So when they release a new UI it will likely find ways to improve beyond the improvements of Impulse. The trick for both companies will be to see who can come out ahead.
So keep up the good work. Hopefully the soothsayers will realize it is worth fighting the DRM overlords and find ways to support those that are already in the battle is the real issue.
All I ever seek in my choices is pricing. Frankly, I'm not too fond of either atm because it seems with the way pricings are going, it is back to good, cheap retail for the near future.
I guess I will air the little whine on Elemental's digital and boxed pricing. Both being the same. I've just grown to expect the digital versions to be cheaper and yet the digital offering shows me no advantage.
All talk on competition is fine but then I see all this about not wanting to compete with retailers on pricing?
LOL. I love that. A "functional part of the game".
How exactly is Steam a functional part of Half-Life 2? I have never played that game online. I don't need to play it online. But I was forced to install Steam just for its DRM.
I would add, in response to your original post, that I don't see why people are bothered that there's more than one distribution network. The thing is it is next to no effort to use both. Neither one costs anything to use, neither one takes up any real amount of resources either running or on disk, and neither interferes with the other. I've had both Steam and Impulse running at the same time and they didn't care at all.
So it isn't as though it is some massive inconvenience. I could see the argument if it were something like different OSes where there is large incompatibilities or an onerous process for running both but there’s not. You can have multiple digital distribution programs on the same computer and use them all easily.
Thus I feel there’s no real reason to care. Use the ones you like. If a game comes out on a given service you don’t have, well sign up, no big deal. I used only Impulse (and Stardock Central before it) for some time. I don’t really care for Steam’s “you have to be online” thing, plus their download servers are kinda pokey. However, a game came out that I wanted that was on Steam, not Impulse (Defense Grid). So I got a Steam account. Now I generally check Impulse first, and then buy from Steam if I can’t get it there. Also, I’ll make choices based off of who is cheaper, if there’s a sale or something.
It is no big deal to use both services, any more than it is a big deal to shop online from both Newegg.com and Amazon.com. It all runs on your computer, it all takes minimal effort and no upfront money on your part, so what’s the big deal?
Finally, Frogboy is right: Competition is good. You want low prices and good features? Then you want people competing. When there’s only one game in town, they get complacent. That’s just what happens. Intel is a great example. Look at the massive jump they took when AMD released the Athlon, and how hard they’ve worked to push things forward. That’s what competition does. If AMD went bust (which is looking like a real possibility) I guarantee they get complacent and don’t release new things nearly as fast or as cheap.
Whether it's Mac nuts or Steamed nuts it is always obnoxious to watch people root for one corporation over another.
I've seen people, even on these forums, wish that Stardock wouldn't make Impulse and just put their stuff on Steam.
When Impulse came out last summer it sucked hard. Now, it's starting to get good. They need to start adding some of the community features. I wish there was an open GamerID thing that I could share between Steam Impulse GFW Xfire and everything.
The Impulse UI is still too colorful for my taste. But in terms of actually buying and downloading games, Impulse kicks. Steams. ass. hard. I bought Left4Dead from Steam and I got like 200k per second. I bought Space Rangers 2 from Impulse and got around 2 megs per second.
But it won't be "fan boys" that decide it. I disagree with Brad about that. Windows beat OS/2 because Microsoft got industry support for Windows. The fans just blindly cheered on the monopolization of the OS market.
I agree. I didn't mean to imply that fans made Windows win in the marketplace.
Consumers are largely unaware of what happens behind the scenes and how businesses can create dominant positions that make them difficult to compete with.
For example, Steamworks is being adopted almost exclusively for the DRM features in it. SecuROM got hammered due to the response to it in Spore and such and publishers started looking for alternatives and Steamworks exists and is proven technology.
The gotcha is that Steamworks requires the game to bundle the Steam client and for the user to become a Steam user. And multiple major publishers, right now, are in the process of integrating Steamworks into their game, often without realizing that other publishers are doing that too at the same time.
Publishers could quickly create a self-perpetuating market dominance for Steam by "standardizing" on Steamworks. Because pretty soon, if the major publishers are turning all their customers into Steam users, then you have a situation where Steam could have 20X as many users as #2 and at that point, they have such a commandling lead that it would be extremely difficult to provide a viable competitor because the publishers aren't going to bother dealing with partners that only have a tiny % of the market.
In that scenario, users wouldn't even have the choice of using Steam or not. They would have to use Steam if they wanted to play games from a lot of the major players.
And imagine the scenario then if one of the major publishers suddenly acquires Valve. In one fell swoop one publisher would have all the customer accounts of all the other publishers.
Over the next few months, watch carefully on new game releases.
Stardock's goal with Impulse isn't to "beat" Steam. But rather, to ensure there's a viable alternative to Steam. I don't think it's in anyone's interest that any entity become dominant in such an emerging market.
I may love my iPod Touch but I'm sure glad Zune exists. Because I would hate to see a situation where songs were only available to purchase on iTunes.
Impulse has a lot of catching up to do in terms of features to be a viable competitor to Steam in the games arena (in the non-games area, it obviously has a tremendous advantage). But that will come in time.
I can see where you're comming from frogboy. But my honest opinion is that if Steam were the only game in town, then it would be bad for us gamers, the same goes if impulse were in that self same position.
However that being said the current situation is as utterly stupid as a monopoly. Every games publisher is moving in to the 'new' digital download area (I've been here since BBS's downloading stuff isn't new) and pretty much EVERY publisher has their own little 'thing' that demands installation AND registration before it'll even ordain to deliver patches let alone allow purchases.
Spore/Red Alert 3 rammed the EA Download Manager (which has a store) down my throat, Supreme Commander (store brought) foisted a GPG.net thingie (which doesn't really work all that well but hinted at a store and patching) and the list goes on. And I do believe that if you brought SoaSE in the store you have to install Impulse to patch the game... so Stardock doesn't escape my irk. And I'm not forgetting that my store brought copy of HalfLife 2 forced me to sign up to Steam before it'd even install/uncompress. Even Microsoft dropped Windows Live for Games on my system which pestered me long after I'd uninstalled Fallout 3, I think bits of it are still roaming my laptop.
So that's 6 games and 5 different widgets I've got to install, uninstall seperatley from the game when I'm done and generally nurse maid on my laptop (a gaming laptop before people yell at me), some of which (Impulse) require me to have additional bits installed before they'll work (the horror that is .net.) Some of which have the audacity to plant themselves as startup items and promptly complain when they can't instantly connect to the internet as they've fired up before my wireless card!
That, simply put, is beyond a joke. And when faced with that mess on my system, I do generally wish someone, somewhere would open a digital shopping centre and let people rent space on it, whilst letting them set prices. And knowing that isn't ever going to realistically happen because everyone wants it their way, yes I'd settle for Steam/Impulse/Whatever being the only game in town. Because whilst I hate a monopoly I hate the current situation a lot more.
Six or seven years ago, would PC gamers have guessed that PC gaming would have sub-platforms, each with exclusive titles? Sounds like consoles in a way, ya? Impulse has GalCiv2, Sins, Demigod, Elemental...Steam has CS, L4D, TF2, HL, and a number of AAA third-party titles. Which brings me to my next point: Valve and Stardock promote their respective platforms through exclusive titles. If Stardock sold Sins over Steam, they might see more sales (earning less money per sale after Valve gets a cut), but they end up destroying Impulse in the process.Should Microsoft put Halo on the PS3? Hell no. Halo drives sales of the Xbox, which brings MS money through subscription fees, DLC, and more game purchases. (I know this is an imperfect comparison -- the two systems have different designs -- but the point is that gaming platforms need exclusives.)Likewise, Valve and Stardock make money if you buy games (or apps) through them. They also make more money per copy sold if they control the means of distribution.
I agree that the industry could do with some consolidation.
I don't want to have to mess with a half dozen Impulse/Steam clients any more than I want to mess with a half dozen instant messenger clients.
But I passionately believe we need at least 2 or 3 of them.
2 or 3 I'd agree with, I'd agree more with "never plants themselves in system startup" as a bonus. In some respects the IM thing gave rise to the likes of Adium/Pigeon and the cross-system clients who's names have been oblitereated by the single malt I'm enjoying.
I mean if all of these systems would offer an open API that 'someone' could write a universal client for then we'd be laughing install 'HyperDrive', feed in the account details from the other clients and bingo it trots off and I've Impulse + Steam + Whatever all ready to go.
Even if the market was separate, being "dominant" in this case would not make it a monopoly or even an oligopoly. Either way the point is moot, since the market is not separate. Arguing semantics won't change that. Since we're both agreeing with each other on the subject, let's just leave it at that.
Is there a reason why they have to be clients? Are publishers not comfortable with a website where you can download simple .exe files? Websites don't need IE or .Net or a client running in the background. I could access my games from IE, Firefox, Opera, etc. As I said in an earlier post, you could send emails notifying customers when their games are updated.Steam won the client war; many gamers don't want more than one or two clients; marketing your service as client-free could be advantageous.You could have the best of both worlds: a client and a basic website for those who don't want to deal with a client. Just musing.
I agree with the basic premise that there should be competition in any capitalist society.
I simply disagree the point that Valve is doing anything "bad" with steamworks really. They released basically an "API" of sorts to let developers use the features in Steam that Valve initially used Steam for. Their goal probably being, they want to have *their* product as the de facto "standard" in the industry to try to gain the biggest segment of the market that they can.
Which led to my whole long-winded example of the windowsblinds format Brad. I think doing things to maintain a company's market share is a perfectly reasonable thing to do (like changing or encrypting windowsblinds formats, and why I said if you *wouldn't* do that, then that would make you a REALLY nice guy).
I'm not a Valve fanboy or a Stardock fanboy (both companies I think make great products), but I have no problem with any of Valve's business decisions from a capitalist viewpoint with Steam.
a.k.a. you just want to get ahead of 'them' (dark music here), while not being as big as to draw flak, right?
Sort of like MS releasing system restore...
Few years later, when Mac does it, Apple is hailed as 'major revolutionary' (comrade).
Oh... MS did it... piss of M$! 1337 h4x0r5 (druggie exits here)
Just be the best Impulse... I still hate you because updates should come as part of a game (like integrate Impulse INTO sins, I don't really wanna buy 'political 2008' or another copy (noncompatible) of Supreme Commander.)
Put. Updater. Into. Game.
Updates. Are. For. Game. Not. Selling. More. Stuff. (though good business plan).
The problem with this theory is that it only holds water if the average person who needs to update their games only has one or two games that Impulse supports. Since Impulse supports more than just SD games, this falls apart.
Impulse is far less dev time/used space/resources than an updater in every single game released, and it benefits the user when they have as little as three games installed (which could conceivably be Sins and the three micro-expansions, even, when they're all out, or for a more current example GC2 and its two expansions).
Plus, Impulse lets them add games by others to the fray as well, which results in one updater for everything, which if not for the fact that you can't queue updates at present, would be a helluva lot more convenient.
I'm going to jump on the bandwidth throttling bandwagon as well-and while I'm at it, I'm going to request that you provide an Offline mode selectable in Impulse. The problems I've been having with archiving since November disappear when Impulse can't connect to the net, but this means I have to muck around with my firewall to block it and then unblock it later.
You're already using IE in Impulse; how hard could it be to implement an IE-like offline mode, even one without any offline pages accessible?
Of course, I'd rather that the issue be fixed. But I'd still like to see an Offline selectable mode.
Would Phase 4 also include the ability to register non-stardock, but impluse downloadable games, that we bought at a brick and mortar store?
ie UT3, UT04......
-Gabe
I think you may be confused. 'High-end graphic settings' refers to the interface, the real value is in the extensive free graphic texturing and back-end programming that allows low and mid range systems to run more efficiently with much greater graphic quality.
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