Even before Gamestop froze Gamestop App formerly-known-as Impulse from in-game purchases, I had my suspicions they were just going to kill it. I know quite a few folk were disappointed when Stardock sold off the asset when WoM failed, I very much preferred Impulse to Steam but have not been thrilled with Gamestop (and it seems some indie dev studios didn't like them either and announced they would no longer put their apps out on Impulse following its acquisition by Gamestop). I've gone through a few new computers since then, and found the Impulse app harder and harder to find at all on Gamestop's website, and the last time I went through this, the app declared in the titlebar that purchasing through the app formerly known as Impulse was no longer supported, so it could only be used to download existing games.
Its finally set itself fully in the grave now, as trying to download some of the old games I had bought way back when on Impulse now instead re-activate the games on Steam. Ce lest vie, Impulse. You went before your time. :/
I know it was a business decision, Stardock needed to re-focus on making games and not get distracted by running a digital distribution retail business as profitable as it might have been, and I'm sure Gamestop had made the best offer in one aspect or another. Really wish it could have gone to Gog, though, or maybe spun off as its own independent business. Not that, as apprehensive and disappointed as I had been about Gamestop getting it, I had anticipated they would seemingly willfully kill it off. Doesn't even make sense to me ... why pay for something that could have made Gamestop more competitive in the digital distribution era only to kill it? I had been excited at the prospect of maybe trading in my old dusty CDs such as GalCiv II (vanilla, when I had later bought the complete collection which meant the vanilla CD was redundant -- similarly for Civ III and Civ IV CDs) for credit I could use to get games through Impulse, but that never happened.
I almost wish all the games on impulse kicked you over to Steam at this point. With a basically shuttered store, that app is basically an old musty library at this point (read: graveyard).
Yes with their astute marketing ablilities Gamestop managed to take Impulse from my Numero Uno place to buy games under Stardock to a place I totally ignore in less than two years. The best marketing campaign I have ever seen since New Coke and the Ford Edsel.
I pretty much abandoned Impulse/Gamestop in less than a year. Some games I was lucky enough to activate on steam. I wish the Stardock games would have done the same. I know. Business and stuff. Unfortunately I see GoG heading in a similar direction with their move to movies, indie, and losing publishers. So I'm not "supporting" them much anymore. I think they want to be an Apple store knock off.
You can activate them on steam!?? Or you just re-purchased them? Is it still possible to roll those titles over to steam?
So terrible, with Gamestop, I stopped being able to even log into Impulse after a few months without doing a bunch of re-registering with gamestop (which I pretty much didn't want to do), and I pretty much left it for dead at that point...
-tid242
Some games like Warhammer and Company of Heroes moved to Steam multi-player so you could activate the keys on Steam after the conversion.
I have some games I want to play that I bought back in the days of impluse, problem is they have no product code or option to download them. what do i do now because i actually want to play the Dawn of war games I paid for them... and now can't even download them.
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