Here's a good article that goes into some detail on the Gamestop / Impulse / Stardock team up.
http://www.joystiq.com/2011/03/31/stardocks-brad-wardell-talks-about-selling-impulse-to-gamestop/
I'm one who likes the idea of digital distribution but have difficulty trusting in it. I think I have good reason to be leery since I have lost a couple hundred dollars worth of digitally distributed music. I didn't think a company the size of Microsoft would ever abandon their music customers. Figured they had too much to lose by the bad publicity and customer ill will it would generate. And I figured that with their power and presence they were a safe bet. Hah! Companies with that much market power aren't affected like that. Even the Vista fiasco and a host of other MS blunders which has cost millions of people, and thousands of businesses a substantial amount of money hasn't had all that big an impact.
Despite being highly motivated to buy Civ5, I passed on it due to the inclusion of the steam client. I won't use steam for various reasons. Trust is part of the equation but more so it's a matter of an open-ended EULA that is all in their favor. Most EULA's tend that way, but steams was over the top. More trust would not have changed my concerns there. Particularly not after scanning through a years worth of their customer support forums. Their privacy policy also gave me pause seeing as how the steam client runs system scans on users computers. A number of lesser considerations also factored in.
Impulses EULA and privacy policy were to my liking however. And the company did have a history I felt I could trust. I didn't trust blind though. I collected data for which to base my judgement on. I was also motivated to support an alternative to steams invasive method. Impulse only runs when you ask it to. I like that. Whereas steam is a control freak - Impulse is a slave to the user. I inherently distrust software which exerts control. While I tend to trust companies who write software which relinquishes control to the user. I made it a point to purchase my first digital only copy of a video game. And my first digital only media purchase since the loss of all my music. I saw it as unlikely that Impulse would be sold. But I never ever, in my worst nightmare scenario, imagined that Impulse would be sold to a company like Gamestop. Accepting this news as fact has brought on a strange feeling of surreality. Like I've just seen a pig fly by, and witnessed the moon fall from the sky.
I share some of your concerns, but I'm a lot more moderate in them. Steam I limit my purchases to games I will play exclusively MPer, to which the DRM doesn't matter. Otherwise, I stick to Impulse/Gamersgate/direct. I also made the decision to not purchase Civ V for that reason.
That said, you should at least give Gamestop a chance to mess up before condemning them. I figure if Gamestop does do something stupid, you'll have some heads up notice, and can archive stuff as needed. I'm not going to scream and ragequit until I have good reason.
No - I won't either. Elemental is the only turkey I've ever bought from SD - and I have (as far as I'm aware) every single game they ever made. Gal Civ (the original) I have twice.
Gamestop have been terrible in the past as far as custromer service, reliability and most tellingly honesty. I understand the call to give them a chance - but in my dealings with them they have already had three - and failed miserably each time.
I should make it clear that my three issues with them (detailed in an earier post) were "3 out of 3" I've only ever tried to buy three things off them, and all of them have ended up in them screwing up - or just being downright dishonest.
I will continue to buy Stardock games that are released retail, but won't get any through Gamestop - after the three episodes I had with them (which cost me a lot of time and money - not to mention hassle) I have no confidence in them at all.
If that means I can't buy SD games at some point in the future - or can't update them, then so be it. Putting cash and faith into Gamestop has bitten me in trhe a$$ three times already - it's not happening again. (Like you said with your experience and not buying Civ 5 through steam)
Scritty
I am not in the Steam hating group, but I do not use it. For me it is mostly that I found Impulse to be a better client, as Steam annoyed me. And they have lost my account since I stopped playing the one game I had from them.
You are correct of course. There is not a huge anti-Steam crowd. But there is a very vocal one. Only have to visit the Bethesda forums to see it.
I guess my point, perhaps not well said, is that there is a good sized vocal anti-Steam/Steam is evil faction which have looked to Impulse, GG, etc. as an alternative. Now you've got Gamestop in the mix which seems to be more universally hated and thus this may drive more people to Steam that refused to use it before.
By exercising due diligence and reading the fine print, I avoid hidden fee scams like the one Gamestop got busted for last year (over 2.1 million in refunds and fines). At this point in my life I've grown to better understand how an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I've done made plenty of mistakes and suffered some memorable consequences. I don't get as many breaks and bruises when I look before I leap. But far more than that, I see harm being done as national chain stores come into my communities and push the locals out. I don't like it, so I won't support it. If I did business with them, I'd be helping them do it to someone else's neighborhood.
I have other reasons to dislike what Gamestop is about. I hate phone spam! I hate spam of any kind. I don't know that they still do this as I stopped doing business with them some time ago. Gamestop used to spam out automated phone messages. The automated ones are the worst! You can hang up, but your phone line is still tied up until the message plays its course. The messages went something like this... Hey, we see you've purchased game X from us. How about trading in that game on a pre-order of game y? Now that might not seem like aaalll that big a deal. But its a clue as to how they view you the customer, and how invasive they are willing to be. Now add that to the fact that they've had a number of lawsuits brought against them relating to privacy violation, employee pay and work site conditions, various hidden fee scams, deceitful advertising, selling used product as new (lots of these suits, some recent and some dating back years), charging bogus tax on service contracts.
They just aren't the kind of people I want to be doing business with. I wouldn't trust them with my payment info. I wouldn't trust their product. I wouldn't trust them to honor their contracts. And I'd always be looking out for that new scam they are trying to pass. I think this way based on their record. They have lied to and cheated their customers and employees. They've done this recently and they've been doing it for years. I'm just not willing to deal with these kind of people.
How does DRM not matter for your multi-player games?
That would be me mostly. I've stayed away from Steam more on principle and used alternatives. But I have reinstalled Steam now to give it another spin. Besides the fact I have needed to come to the realization that I would probably have to use Steam anyway for Skyrim thus this move has less sting to it.
The biggest thing about Steam for me is the "forced" nature of it. To buy at retail (like Fallout New Vegas) and be forced to use the Steam client always rubbed me the wrong way and I avoided it. But seems it's inevitable now so I welcome my Steam overlords.
Impulse client is pretty crappy, actually. It's "better" just in the sense that's optional and you don't have to run it to play a game, after the first installation... but when it comes to community features, integration, usefullness etc, Steam client is lightyears better.
Anyway I was wondering if there's any plan from Gamestop to push the Impulse reactor DRM or if they are going to drop it.
Better in that it does not annoy me. And it does everything I want for it to do.
I've always marginally prefered Impulse myself, not by any significant amount but enough to buy games from it over Steam. But Steam doesn't bother me either and I'm happy to buy from them as well. So this news doesn't really bother me too much, in the worst case scenario the competition will spur Steam to be better and I'll just buy from them intead. Best case scenario Impulse will get better and I'll keep buying from them.
Speaking of annoying though, since I've installed Impulse on my new computer I've been getting constant pop up ads from them which interrupt me when I'm doing other things. I've heard you can disable them but they clearly don't make it obvious how to do that. They are way more annoying then anything Steam has. I never used to get things like that, it must be the new version.
Anecdotally, the more it seems that you view Stardock and Impulse as something special, the worse this news is going over. People who really hate Steam were more likely to fall into that group, but it's not everybody.
In my case, I got all the "Stardock is different then other developers" stuff out of my system after Elemental's launch (and particularly the debacle that multiplayer is). Now they're just a company that makes games in genres I like. With that, Impulse is just an alternative to Steam to me (one that's less intrusive and less featured). So I don't have a particular horse in this race.
Except that I want to see a true competitor to Steamworks emerge to keep Steam honest, and I think Gamestop might be in a better position to make it happen.
Those have been in for quite a while, most likely you had it off on the old computer and the new install flipped the setting.
Right click on the Impulse tray icon, and go to Settings. Disable "Show Promotions".
You go to Impulse and under Impulse Settings uncheck run Impulse Now on Startup. You may need to remove Impulse Now from the Startup folder of the Windows Start menu manually. Otherwise there maybe a way to change Impulse Now to not do that (and just give alerts about game updates), but I am less familiar with it.
There used to be but for some reason it no longer exist.
Just saw this joke on another forum:
[URL=http://img813.imageshack.us/i/1680.jpg/][/URL]
Turning off show promotions on the tray menu settings worked, thanks. For some reason there was no option for that in the settings menu on impulse itself.
heh... that re-download fee concept is a little bit scary, actually, as they could implement something like that. hopefully the don't go those routes. Time will tell.
EA's first attempt at a digital store did exactly that. It went poorly.
Actually I don't think it did. AVG had this problem also - I don't know if Digital River gave them a reason to offer the option or what but that completely useless 'spend money to redownload the product' thing was all Digital River from what I've seen.
Ah, I remember buying a digital title or two from Matrix Games. They use Digital River, and tried to sell me on an extended download package. Some companies really treat their customers as idiots.
sure
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=64160&page=5
LOL!!! That's the forum where the Brad-haters dwell
That it was THEY who created that image is just TOOO perfect
....Me think is gonna be a little when he sees that image.
I'm not sure you understand. The image and the comments have very little to do with Brad and everything to do with Gamestop.
And I doubt Brad could care less. He's not really a part of Impulse anymore. What Gamestop does with it doesn't reflect on him.
I am sure he already saw it - he posted in that thread at QT3
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