I have recently had an interaction with Steam on my recent purchase of ETW through D2D. I wanted to make it know how much I appreciate the quality of the Impulse service after experiencing Steam. It has been over 8 hours since I finished downloading the game from D2D but I cant install it b/c Steam keeps thinking it needs to downloaded it from their own servers but I didnt buy it from them so it errors out... Its a nightmare...
Thank you Stardock and the Impulse Team for offering such a stellar service. I have never had a single problem with Impulse. Again, thank you.
seconded
Not that Impulse is without failings, but SD does a great job of customer satisfaction and has a great product.
Thank you all for the kind words, we do our best and it's nice to see it appreciated.
Ya, I had to restart my comp after ETW install since it kept bugging, freezing, and generally slowing down my computer. This was probably due to it going into sleep mode half way through install though...
Absolutely agree. Actually I've just been having a moan to people on IRC about the same thing. I don't mind having to register for Steam, except that I would like to play without first having to download a huge patch. Also, my internet connection is flaky, and getting Steam to actually sign in, let alone actually download anything, is a real chore.
Meanwhile Empire Total War also uses Steam's installer. This means it doesn't bother to ask about shortcuts, install for all users or install path.
As for Dawn of War 2 requiring both Steam and Games for Windows Live, I would love to meet the genius who came up with that one.
Steam is popular because Valve have released great games, not on its own merit.
Edit: Ok that post somehow became a venemous tirade against Steam, but I really just wanted to thank Stardock for making a much better product.
The difference between Impulse and Steam:
Stardock/Impulse focuses on customer Care therefore makes lots of cash.
Steam focuses on making cash, bolts on customer service, and therefore fails on both.
There is a huge difference between Customer Care and Customer Service. Because Stardock practice the former, the latter just happens as a natural by product. Steam has no idea what the concept of Customer Care means, and therefore it will never succeed at Customer Care, let alone succeed at long term revenue growth - Steam will in the end, choke off its own revenue stream by such short term sillyness.
Eventually it will penetrate the brains of the less well endowed that a philosophy of constant short term dash-for-cash, always ends in grief, its only a question of who holds the parcel when the music stops - as the Banks recently and painfully found out.
RegardsZy
I love Impulse too, but I really can't say I have experienced one single problem with Steam in years.
This thread sounds just a meaningless whine from a newbie user, to me.
I would like to post a partial retraction of my disparaging comments above. The reason ETW wasn't installing was b/c D2D provided me with only the product key for extra content rather than the key for the game. It is not know if this was an overlook on the part of D2D, Steam, or Sega. I will also say that once the proper key was used the game installed without incident.
I did not intend for this to be a whining thread but as a thank you to Stardock. As mentioned above I was overly harsh to Steam and I admit that. That, however, does not change the fact that I will still be hesitant to use Steam and D2D in the future because of this experience.
No, when I installed my physical copy of Dark Messiah Might and Magic, it checked with steam and then downloaded for a couple of hours and seemed to install all over again. When I uninstalled it, it left files all over the place! I had to uninstall Steam completely in order to get rid of them all. Now I hear that E:TW is having similar problems and I'm left assuming that all third-party physical copies of games requiring Steam will pull the same crap.
Physical copies of Valve games, however, are a breeze to install. Go figure. I'd rather buy from Impulse, since they treat third-party software with as much respect as their own.
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