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
You have to put the Steam client in the directory in which you want the games to install. But yeah, it's apain in the arse and should be set up so you can choose to install the actual game wherever you want, no matter where you install Steam.
yes, i have steam in D:\games\steam...
But that limits all my games to that directory, if i say, get another drive/partition i can't switch partitions for steam games.
With competition there can be pressure to improve... if steam thinks its enough of a problem and that they will lose sales for it, they will fix it, until then nothing will change. so "consolidate on steam" is silly...
there is also the notion of steam taking a cut of the profits... thats like saying everyone should be selling their stuff through walmart... some people sell direct, some people sell through other stores. communism consoldiates everything, but as long as there is free trade there is competition.
But why would you want to spread your game installations over many partitions? If you lose the main partition and its OS registry you will invalidate all of those installs and recovering them means reinstalling all over again.
The whole reason Steam installs everyone to one folder is to localize it. That folder contains 100% of the game and if you copy it and move it to another install of Steam on a seperate partition or even another computer it will work exactly as it did on the original.
For me, it's because I like to have my program files on a separate partition from my games. My games are all on one partition, yes, but now I have a Steam folder on that partition with the Steam game inside it. Not a big deal, really, but not the way I like to organize my system.
Ah, I do the same thing but use two seperate hard drives instead. The main one has borked a couple of times but my second one with all my games on it survived untouched.
I`m just curious, Why do this? Does it improve performance? I guess if the hard drive was partioned into smaller sections the pc could access files faster, I think.
organization comes to play, as well as backups, raid arrays, space limitations, and a variety of other factors that can change where you want specific things to go...
It can improve performance, reduce defrag and backup times, and improve chances of recovery from disk error, data loss, or loss of a volume - since all your eggs aren't in just one basket. Drive failures, disk sector damage, and user error occur. Partitioning can help mitigate the damage, speed recovery, and minimize loss of data. I know this from personal experience.
I maintain separate partitions for:
* the operating system
* programs
* program data and user profiles
* system pagefile
* archives (usually patches and updates, as well as progams that I download and wish to retain the installers for)
* temp stuff (where my browser downloads go by default - like programs/apps I want to try out, game demos, etc.) that I may install or open once or twice then uninstall or delete.
Operating system, program and archives don't change much. Defragmentation times are reduced on those partitions, and when I do a backup, I usually skip those partitions - because I have disks or can re-download what is needed to recover.
program data and user profiles change moment to moment. I back these up more regularly, and defrag these partitions more often. But both processes take less time and money (in terms of storage costs) than doing full backups or defragmenting all four drives (which total about 660GB on my main home PC).
I never backup or defrag the pagefile partition or temp stuff. A fault on those partitions is completely recoverable.
If you get fancy and put your operating system, pagefile, programs and data on different spindles (drives) you can maximize read and write performance (and thus, overall system performance) as those operations run through separate disk controllers and bus paths.
Bottom line: Maintenance time/costs, risk of data loss, and disk operation times, are all increased on a system with a single partition that contains everything.
Thanks for the reply`s. I apologize for going off topic in this thread. I have another question now.
How can this be done? Woudn`t each partition have to have the OS and page file present in each parttiion?
Here are my reasons:
I don't really use a separate partition for games, but I do use a different folder where they have more permissions.
Nope. The pagefile need not be on the same partition as the OS. In fact, on Linux and some other OSes, it's normal to have the pagefile on a separate partition.
I've moved my own pagefile onto my backup drive, believe it or not. The reason being Microsoft discovered an ugly truth about some hard drives and performance (which I've always suspected, as my drives always seemed to be slow even though they were high RPM), and unfortunately my own hard drives were some of the drives exhibiting this behavior. Only my backup drive was a different model and might not have that problem, so I moved the page file to it. So new, faster drives without the behavior are on my list of stuff to buy when I get the money.
Adding to CobraA1's reply, just to be clear, the default setup on Microsoft operating systems so far is to have the pagefile on the system partition (usually, the C: drive). But you can set the pagefile to whichever volume you wish in Control Panel under "System". On XP:
Start | Control Panel | System | Advanced | Settings (under Performance) | Advanced | Change (under Virtual memory)...
set "No paging file" on the partitions or volumes you don't want the pagefile to be on. Set custom size or system managed size on the partition you want the pagefile to be on, click "Set" and you'll be prompted to restart the system.
Also, there are tools that MS provides, primarily intended for system support professionals doing unattended installs, that allow you to define non-standard paths for your user profiles, temp folder, pagefile, program files folder, as well as defining which components of a windows install you wish to actually install. The tools are free, they're part of Microsoft's Automated Installation Kit (AIK) (google for it, it's free).
Using that you can write 'answer files' that respond to all the install prompts automatically - and also set options for things that a normal disk installation for Windows OS's don't prompt for. It's complicated - you do need to read a lot to ensure you know what you're setting up. However, most of those options are available in 3rd party (free) products like nLite (XP) and vLite (Vista), and others, which provide a nice GUI for these options. making it much easier.
P.S. Cobra, thanks for the link to the 7 article.
P.P.S. To add to the actual topic, and expand on a prior response I made on-topic, I see support for other operating systems to be inline with Frogboy's prior points about wanting to see at least a few companies competing for digital distribution services. Having at least a couple of AAA game titles on OSX or Linux would be very interesting.
Others have covered many of the reasons, but to clarify: I have my games on a separate drive altogether from my Program files and OS.
I like impulse. I like the Stardock/IronClad combo. I like Valve. So I have Steam. I think one without the other would suck. It could be stated that the compitition between the two serves the customer best. Think of it like this...A race with one racer. He knows hes gonna win so theirfore doesn't expend the amount of drive it would take had there been another racer. With both companies tring to out do the other gives us the players better games. So make em Cry SD/IC.
Let me be up front about something...I like Stardock, like Impulse, and would prefer to buy all my games through it. I like Steam too, and I like Valve.
That said, the idea that Impulse competes with Steam is ludicrous. Most steam users arent even aware of its existence, and if they are, arent going to be swayed by Impulse's catalog of games. If there is not significant overlap on the games being offered, there is NO retail competition to be had. Its not like I can get the same games cheaper on Impulse. No retail competition is occuring.
The only competition is in terms of content and user experience. The content battle is completely upside down. Impulse simply doesnt have very many games I might want to buy, wheras Steam has *most* of the games I might want to buy. The best games on IMpulse are a couple of indie niche games that are fantastic, but with limited mainstream appeal( and I wouldnt have it any other way...if Stardock stops making these kinds of games, I wouldnt have any reason aty all to want to support them). User experience is impossible to accurately measure...both services have had people with problems. For my part, Steam has always worked infallibly for me...minor issues with Impulse have been frequent, but it is a much younger platform.
Understandably, its a catch 22. Steam only got that triple A catalogue power, by being large, influential, and succesful, and you can't get large and succesful without that large triple A catalogue. But as it is now, Impulse is simply the best of the "Also Rans", with increasing competition from some other indie developers, who also have the good will of their fanbase. Steam probably competes more with Direct 2 Drive (not that I advocate that service), than Impulse.
So yes, obviously competition is good. I'm still waiting to see some.
Impulse is great and amazing. I like it much more than Steam, and the downloads on impulse are faster and the interface is much better easier to get updates.
Here is the main problem: SINs is probably the best brand name game you got on there, followed by GalCiv and both are in "niche" markets. To gain more market share you're going to have to get A-list titles on or very near their release dates such as Fallout 3 or Red Alert 3 etc.
Right now, many of us impulse users are hard-core stardock loyalists like me. You'll always have us and hopefully you always have that buffer to fall back on, but you're going to have to really expand to defeat Steam's monopoly. A merger with gamersgate might be a good idea, just don't sacrifice what impulse is and stands for.
You could focus on 1 part of the market as well in your acquisiton strategy such as Strategy games, the 1 part of the PC gaming market that isn't crumbling to consoles. Empire: Total War, which is coming out soon ... Company of Heroes' expansion in April from Relic ... Red Alert 3 expansion in March all great titles that could incorporate Impulse as the strategy game download mecca.
As soon as civilization 5 comes out, you know you want it here on impulse at release date. Also another game developer you may want to contact is Paradox (swedish) for their niche strategy gaming titles. Europa Universalis III, Victoria, Hearts of Iron 3 coming out soon... Paradox dominates the Turn-Based gaming PC world after Civilization + GalCiv.
@Dorian - Paradox is already on Impulse. I think if SD and PI form a very close alliance things will be good. There is also the relationship with GPG that is also coming into play. There are other things going on but the crux of it all is that I firmly believe Impulse will be a contender in the near future. I would also like to see GOG get into the mix as well.
I don't think you understood the point of the article.
It's not a Steam vs. Impulse issue.
The article is about users who WANT Steam to be a monopoly.
I'm probably one of those people who said I'd rather see Stardock games on Steam, and at this point I have mixed feelings on the matter.
On the one hand, I don't want Valve to have a monopoly on digital distribution. They're a cool company now, but they're one buy out away from having a radically different corporate culture (hell, it's almost worth it for EA to buy them for Steam's userbase alone). This is why I appreciate competition in the market, and why I'm not averse to buying games on Impulse.
On the other hand, I don't want to see these marketplaces divided up by exclusivity and whatnot. My nightmare scenario is that I install Impulse for Stardock games, Steam for Valve games, EA Downloader for EA games, etc. This is becoming less likely as, for example, EA now sells its games on Steam, but it seemed a very real possibility for a while.
Really what I'm looking for is not to be reliant on a single company for digital distribution, but rather a single interface for it. I'd be extremely pleased with a marketplace application which allowed me to buy the same game from Stardock, Valve, Direct2Drive, or whomever offered the best price/DRM. In an ideal world I suppose that would be run by a neutral third party out of the goodness of their hearts, but I understand it doesn't work like that.
I think Justus has the right of it.
The difference between retail and downloads is this. Excepting the cost of gas and the time of transit, going to any store is approximately as invasive and expensive to your day-to-day routine as going to any other store. So each store has a relatively level playing field with its nearby customers.
This is not the case for downloaders. If you have one installed already, well, you have it. To use another one is to add one more thing that does exactly what this other thing you already have does, except that they have different product lists. Imagine if buying from one retail store caused them to set a kiosk up outside your front door from which you could by anything else they sell. Would you really want to go all the way to some other store to buy something that these guys sell right at your front door?
Also, I would have to say that the "One Steam Future" is far from dark. First, even if they do start abusing their monopoly, it will either be with the consent of developers (splitting the profits with them) or without. And if its without, they'll simply create another downloadable platform that gives them fair compensation. As far as the customer's interest is concerned, if Steam starts overpricing games, people won't buy them.
The PC is an open platform, and that's not going to change no matter what Steam does. Creating an alternative downloadable platform doesn't even require real programming talent; you can do it on a webpage. Even if Steam has the dominant marketshare in the downloadable arena, there will always be alternatives.
Stardock has clearly determined that a one vendor monoply is not going to exist with its consent and hence has provided another downloadable platform that gives htem fair compensation.
The best way to deal with a monopoly is to work against a monopoly being created in the first place.
Incidentally, a "One Steam future" would be one without Stardock making games. Our business model is based on the assumption of digital distribution in which a third party isn't collecting 30% of our revenue.
I tried the demo of this the other day - while I enjoyed it as it was Halo, and it had awesome cut scenes, the controls are definately not up there with mouse and keyboard etc... As such, the pace of the game seems a little slower then some PC RTS games I have played in the past.
When Microsoft was sued for monopolistic practices, both MacOS and Linux existed and had marketshare. Yet Microsoft was found to have a (legal) OS monopoly.
Just because someone else has an alternative doesn't mean that there is viable competition. While I'm sure SD will sell their games through Impulse for the forseeable future, SD's games alone do not allow Impulse to constitute viable competition with Steam. It will simply mean that people who want SDs games have to put up with having both Steam and Impulse on their machines.
Nobody want Steam to be the only option! But until Impulse has more high profile games, Steam may be the only platform that some gamers may think about or want.
Impulse has a lot of indie games, but the market for those is indeed niche. Any popular games in the store are old as well. This does not make users think that it's a worthwhile platform.
I know that the list is continuously growing but it's going slowly.. What we need to 'break the monopoly' is a list of games to rival those of Steam. (I do prefer Impulse over Steam myself, but find the lack of games I want disturbing...)
i myself have no problems with steam. all of my games are there, ready to be downloaded, no chances and losing disks or not being able to install a game because the disc is too scratched.
the dl speeds could be faster, but ill live with it .
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
