f13.net

Can't say I've ever used Impulse because... well, Steam.  I guess maybe Gamestop is starting to realize that the used game gravy train might not last forever.


From Gamasutra: (http://gamasutra.com/view/news/33862/Gamestop_To_Acquire_Stardocks_Impulse_Download_Service_Streaming_Tech_Company.php)

Hm, so I can give money to Impulse without giving it to Stardock anymore (yay) but I'd be giving it to Gamestop instead (boo). Guess I'll stick with Steam.

Just another reason to not use Impulse, I guess.  :oh_i_see:

Wonder if Gamestop will try to leverage its retail presence to try and strong-arm publishers into making their multiplatform releases Impulse-exclusive, or at least sans-Steamworks.

Considering that publishers think very little of Gamestop due to their love of the secondary market and pushing resold games (where they get all the profit) over new games.. I wouldn't hold my breath on that one.

Yeaaaah.

Sad to say, but this is likely the final nail in Impulse's tiny coffin. At least with me.

Why would I need anything other than Steam?

Gamersgate has a more Euro-centric selection (weird East European hybrids and strategy games), early access to Paradox publications, and sales that are often as deep as Steam. They also don't have anything like the Steam client - you install their games and run them directly.

Good Old Games is a cheap, DRM-free nostalgia trip.

My problem with Impulse is that they were Steam-lite. They never had anything compelling to offer - they had a subset of Steam's catalog, with less-frequent sales, running through a bulky client that didn't offer Steam's chat capabilities. Aside from Stardock's catalog - which isn't early as diverse as Paradox's - Impulse lacks distinguishing features. I wanted to give them money, but they never had anything I wanted to buy.

This is a sad day.   I love Steam but having just one digital distribution channel is a very bad thing.   We'll be one step closer to a total Steam monopoly when gamestop is done shooting Impulse in the foot repeatedly though.

Impulse was bloated and inefficient to run on my systems.  Only thing I used it for was Sins of a Solar Empire. 

Looking at the half-ass way Gamestop (horrible website interface, terrible customer rewards system) creates anything online, this is most definitely a nail in the Impulse coffin. 

Gamersgate is the only one I 'regularly' use besides Steam, and that only because yeah, I can get Paradox stuff there that is unavailable elsewhere. They have plenty of other things too, I just happen to prefer Steam's single launch interface and autopatching and such so I will buy there when possible.

Dinosaurs Mating (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/dinosaurs-mating.html)

I'm not too worried about steam. If they get fat, lazy and stupid a challenger can quite easily become profitable and grow to compete with them. Much more so than the amount of inventory, retail and marketing you would need to compete with gamestop.

I hope this acquisition kills the platform. I don't even care if I lose the 5 games I have attached to my account there. The app is like Steam, day 1, out of the Half-Life 2 box from a store shelf.

Edit: Thing about Steam is that it's the World of Warcraft in a much smaller niche. Yea, delivering games is a smaller niche than MMOGs. At least with MMOGs you can play around the genre/archetype (make a sci-fi crafting game - errrrr, Seed, or whatever). Point being, you don't have to compete directly with WoW. If you want to deliver a game via the internet tube architecture, you need to compete directly with Steam. You need to compete with what is arguably the single most compelling, full-featured, and high performance platform ever conceived for delivering games. In other words, you're fucked. I'm completely content with Valve getting a monopoly in the game delivery space, even if they were to never put another item on sale (this is unlikely as there's enough competition on Steam itself between devs/publishers that there will always be sales).

tl;dr Everything but Steam is horrible.

The one thing impulse always had going for it in my view was that they took on more esoteric games than steam did. On the other hand there were a few games that it let me search for (and find) that wasn't available in my region. :why_so_serious:

The last time I looked at Impulse, it had lots of games that weren't available in my region. Ones that were available in my region via local retail, internet mail order etc. Oh, and via Steam.  :uhrr:

Kinda hoping this one is just an April 1st joke...

I sure don't. I hope this drags GameStop down. I know it won't, but I can always dream.

The only reason I own anything on Impulse is due to developers who refused to release on Steam for whatever reason.

But I agree with Schild that if you want to play with PC digital downloading, you need to be at least half as feature complete as Steam. And I just don't see anyone jumping into that market who is even trying anything more than the "huh, so I can charge the same as a box copy, but not actually have to deal with much of a supply chain? JACKPOT!"

That could be said for early steam too, for a good long time.

Hi thar. I'm gonna use your connection to bounce my Downloads off. Oh you hit your download limit and are fucked. Too fucking bad.

Yeah that happened.

I dont know why everyone worships the shit out of steam. Every time I look it it its the most intrusive piece of shit I have on my system. Its like "Oh Hi Valve. Please install malware and spyware in my system to slow it down so I can play Supreme commander 2. Love you." Its a bit like people playing wow and defending it because it familiar, hugely muscled undead and all.

Oh yeah, and speaking of supreme commander 2, anything that forces me to download the ENTIRE FUCKING GAME when I have the cd disk in my drive is not the most complete and non bloated feature complete thing in existence. And yes it did. And the supcom website found the only solution was to alter your registry to stop it doing it. You want people to fuck around withtheir registeries??? Oh yeah and if I don't want to install a patch for this game right now it means I DON'T WANT TO SPEND 2 HOURS DOWNLOADING A FUCKING STUPID PATCH RIGHT NOW WHEN I WANT TO GAME. And no there's no option to turn that off. I've looked.

Impulse lets me patch when I want, play when I want, not have impulse running when I want to play the game (how the fuck can something be bloated when you don't have to run it. Turn it off when you're finished downloading patches and games, dumnass) and is a basic but entirely functional and very stable download system. And by the way I've paused and unpaused my latest game download multiple times without a problem, because I actually HAVE a download limit and I needed to spread it around. This has been going on for a couple of weeks. Not a single hitch.

Impulse and gamersgate is all I want and need in a download service. I don't care how good you are on a game and I have no interest in having anyone else knowing how good I am either. And if I wanted Valve looking at what I'm doing in every game I play and logging everything I do in said game I'd buy them a plane ticket. And X3 has had problems with its steam version too. Go figure.

For fuck sake, you assholes wont even buy a game when its a direct download from the publisher if its not on Steam. Wtf?

PS No, I have not had one single good experience with steam, and yes I've tried it multiple times.

Sounds like Sinij has a disciple.

Steam today, is quite nice. My comments were about early steam. I used to avoid it like the plague, now, I'm fully converted, but only because of the improvements made. Individual game makers DRM aside.

I have no real need for another like system, just like I have no real need for 5 different IM programs.

Grandpa T?! what are you doing out here in the street? Get back to your old tv and comfy chair, I know that the new and different is scary, I know, it's OK. Let's go back inside and watch Matlock.

(X3 works fine with steam)

How long will it improve if there is no alternative, though?

Impulse doesn't need to be running. Steam's TSR however is far less offensive than Impulse's (Impulse would prefer if you'd leave it running, hence why it has a nice My Games tab and launcher via it. It also has a nice habit of minimizing your Impulse driven game mid gameplay to tell you about a new sale going on, which is fucking stupid.)

I'm not sure what the pause/resume thing is about. Steam has pause/resume. The usual complaint I see with steam and pausing is when you start a single player game, steam pauses all running updates/downloads, and you need to alt tab back out to start them up again.

But calling modern steam malware is.. hilarious at best. Old steam? Yeah, it was bad. Telling it to start at boot time increased your system's time till desktop is usable by a good minute or two.

But the reality of the situation is that as a pure download service, Steam and Impulse have all the same features, with Steam having far more actual titles available. As a sales platform, Steam's marketing features are so far ahead of Impulse it's not even funny (their default front page is far better, their notice on exiting a steam game of other offers is actually pretty tastefully done. About the only marketing of games issue Steam has is that their new releases page is permanently flooded with DLC for some train game).

Essentially, there's absolutely nothing we can say Impulse is better at. I'm pretty sure you can inform steam that you don't want it to auto update games as well, Sir T. It's just enabled by default because it's a really freaking useful feature.

Steam's competitors don't get to choose which point in time/space they want to compete.  They're competing now.  We're at now, now.   So, don't bring it up.  It's like when people say, "Ohh WoW didn't have this at launch, cut this game some slack."  Too bad you didn't release back then, suckasses.

If another digital download service had a better offering of stuff that I wanted that Steam didn't, sure I might use it (I'm not into Paradox games at all).  But I really don't want to have to deal with more than one virtual repository of my PC gaming collection.  There's no real jRPG or sRPG gaming niche on the PC, consoles take (or took mostly) care of that.

Sir T's comments are.. as usually, interesting. 2 hours for a patch? Heh, I downloaded all of Dragon Age II while I was putting my son to bed.  You can pause downloads on Steam.  You can play offline apparently (I never have).  

Maybe I can get Stardock games on Steam now.


:why_so_serious:

Uh, It was a comparison between an early like product and a young like product. Because someone brought up performance and reasons they avoid. My point was exactly that steam has had enough time to fix the problems, and convert the non believers before this new one even really sprang up. Hence why it has a huge uphill battle to get people to use it, and likely a bad investment by gamestop.

I thought it was completely relevant, ill check with you next time I post.

I've never really figured out the offline drama in steam. For me, it's always been fine when travelling. Download game. Run game. When on the road, open steam, click Offline Mode when it asks, play game. I've only had drama if the game has a non steam DRM attached to it that demands to go online.

But if we're going to compare "when they started", we should point out that when Impulse started, you couldn't buy games with actual monies, you had to do the xbox points style bullshit, where you bought "coins" and spent those on games. You know, the cheap scheme to force you to always have a leftover balance because a game never costs 5 coins, but they only sell coins in 5 packs kind of shit.

Yeah I've never understood it either. I play offline on my laptop all the time.

This. Twice. When Steam becomes the monopoly digital distribution platform, it will be because it fucking owned everybody else's face. You want to compete? DON'T SUCK.

I will no longer buy a PC game if its not available on Steam.  Period.  The absolute only exception I've made to this is Blizzard products.  Other than that, if its not available on Steam, then the game hasn't god damn been released yet, as far as I'm concerned.

I own like 1.5 games on Impule, versus probably over a hundred on Steam. But still, Steam is still far from perfect - sometimes you can't gift a game that it says that you can gift, it can take 5 minutes to start up sometimes almost every time. Shits itself while connecting half the time, and just now, while trying to install TW:Rome. You know, a game wot I bought and paid for. It spent 5 minutes preparing, then told me that the Steam servers are too busy right now. Fuck off and do something else for the moment and try again later.

We need the Impulses of the world, as shitty as they may be so that Steam still has some reason to try and keep their shit on the ball rather than getting completely fat and lazy and useless and broken.

This*. It's not just the convenience of letting steam manage my game collection, the constant huge sales add to this, too. I haven't purchased a boxed game in around year, and not a day 1 in at least half that, and I'm still backlogged.



*well, and occasionally GoG

I'm certainly not worried about Steam starting to suck from a user perspective.   I worry more about them upping the cut they take from smaller dev studios.  They probably wouldn't do it right now but that market is growing and it would be a lot more cash for them to do so in the future.

This.

I have about 5 games on impulse, main of which is SoaSE (much like HL2 was for steam), and I think close to 200 on steam, and I don't really foresee that changing much, but steam does need competition to make sure they keep updating and keep the sales etc going. It would also be nice if steam also took on even more of the smaller studioes/games, and to be honest it would be nice if they were to fix the storefront so f.ex if I go into top sellers, look at a game, and hit back, I'm not suddenly back to the new releases tab.

Apart from those too small or too big, Steam pretty much is the PC gaming industry from a sales point of view. It is controlled by one company. Every now and again rumours are raised about someone buying Valve and in one fell swoop picking up 70% or so of all games digital distribution.

There needs to be alternatives for that reason. If you don't like GameStop buying Impluse, imagine EA / Microsoft / Apple buying Valve.

Newell said he'd sell Valve over his dead body only. Well, he better get on a goddamn StairMaster, but you get the point. Valve's also not publicly traded, so no one can do a hostile take-over.

And the reason Impulse was sold is because the Stardock CEO is a money grubbing dickhead*. He probably figured that he'd not get closer to Steam and went the easy way out. Also, GameStop would theoretically have more to offer to publishers than some shitty indie studio.

(*: You can check him out on the Neowin forums to see what a humonguous power-tripping faggot he is. He owns large part of Neowin, too, FYI.)

So much for gamer's rights....

1...2...3 until DRM, spyware and all other crap getting bundled via Impulse.

Are you... retarded?

Since when did gamestop deal in DRM, spyware etc? I mean jesus.

I'm ambivalent to the whole takeover, really. I'm being hopeful that gamestop'll end up giving impulse the added monetary clout it might need to get more titles so it gets more attractive. While I like steam, it does need competition.

It's more likely that they'll let you sell back your rights to play whatever game you downloaded for pennies on the dollar.  :why_so_serious:

Have you been to a gamestop before?

These are the same folks that try to squeeze every buck out of the stone; pushing useless warranties, pushing used games to customers trying to buy new, pushing exchange used for more used games schemes, pushing preorders... list goes on. Nothing good will come out of that corporate thievery culture getting unleashed on Impulse.

I actually enjoyed Impulse, unlike Steam its not intrusive and you don't even have to touch it unless you are downloading something. This all is likely to go away, and yes I am pissed about it.

Here is what likely to happen to Impulse:

1. You will have to keep Impulse on and connected to play games because....
2. They will pump adds via Impulse client, if are forced to run Impulse to play your games you will be exposed to some adds every time you play...
3. Used games model will get refined in some way - unless they get sued to stop it, expect them to sell the same game multiple times... likely they will sell "access" (see #1) to "cloud gaming".

I fully support your batshit crazy crusade against a gaming delivery system that is based entirely on speculation.

You sir are a pioneer, and a God among lesser men.

For April 1, Kongregate (which got bought by Gamestop a while back) implemented a silly "KongStop" feature that let you "trade in your used Flash games" for Kongregate points. Kind of made me wonder if GS is realizing how outmoded their MO is becoming. At a guess I'd say it's more likely that somebody at Kong was poking fun at their new overlords, but who knows.

Oh dear, cheaper gaming for the masses, these people most be really evil.

I support the whole reselling of games bit. There's no reason at all why that shouldn't be possible.
Steam is pushing preorders these days as well, pretty hard. They can't push preorders without the support of the publisher/developer, though, especially not when they offer lame in-game "boons" such as "extreme range sniper rifles" in deus ex 3, etc.

You can't really blame that on steam, though. That's just the way the gaming industry is heading.
I have steam and impulse running all the time, and impulse is actually the more intrusive of the two, popping up sales of little-known games for 20-30 NOK. I don't mind that, actually, I like seeing what's out there.

I'm sure you'd never see any ads if you kept steam in an offline mode, but I understand you don't know how that works. vOv
Oh, you mean kind of like onlive?

Edit: Gamestop sucks. That is all.

A challenger appears.

 :drillf:

It should be possible, but it's a massive conflict of interest that a major seller of 'green title' new games and then resell second hand copies of the same title. Great for gamers to get the game cheap and then be able to trade it back for store credit, bad for the publisher / developer.

Even "new" Gamestop games are used.

You mean gutted, or actually used copies being resold as new?

If it's anything like it used to be at Babbage's, employees can check out games for personal use, return them, and sell them as new.  The easy way to tell was to check the shrink-wrap - folded versus seam style.

I haven't found the price difference between new release used games to be that much less than the same game that is brand new.  Maybe $10 cheaper at most.  If theres a game I want at release, I will spend the extra $10 to get the brand new copy.  The price difference between older used and new games isn't usually that much, either.

re: used game prices:

It seems based on the popularity of the game/difficulty in obtaining it.

Want Gears of War 2 used two weeks after release? You're going to save $5. Want used shovelware? Probably 50% off. Want a used import that never sold well in the US? Good luck finding it in a store, and it'll probably be near full price.

It's accurate as far as they price what the market will accept, but it means that the sales pitch of "zomg, used games, save a bundle!" is usually pretty oversold. You save a ton of money.. if you want to play things you probably shouldn't spend any money on.

Or if you want to play games that are older than a year - there's actually a decent markdown on older used console games. When you're talking about paying $10 for a used game as opposed to $15 or $20, the percentages are better there. But yes, buying a used copy for $5 less is really kind of silly.

Remember when Gamestop would robo-call you to try to buy back the games you just bought from them two or three days before?

I stopped giving them my home phone number very quickly after that lapse of judgement.

I too never bought in to the practice of buying recently-released games used - I'd rather the dev get their piece.

Not to say I don't buy used, but it's not normally my first choice. For instance, I bought all 3 Shadowhearts games used, years after release. Same for Disgaea 1 and 2.

Same reason I'd prefer to buy online. There's more chance of a smaller dev getting both a release and a bigger share of the money. With less of the money going to someone who does nothing but move boxes around and pay for some magazine adds. I'm not sure if steam is perfect in that regard, though I'm pretty sure it can offer a better deal than retail, but it can only improve as online sales are the focus, have even more volume and people challenge steam for a slice of the pie.

I'm almost to the point where I buy everything online and refuse to pay big shops full price for anything. I will buy almost anything that isn't a platformer or bizarre puzzle game from an indie shop if it's $9.99 and not a buggy POS on the forums.

Most of my purchases are online as well now. I think the last two console games I bought were NHL2011 and Mass Effect 2 (to go with my ME1 console playthrough).

I'm shifting online, even for console titles, as the Australian dollar hits US$1.04 and new games are STILL over AU$100. To buy Dead Space 2 (Xbox 360) off the shelf in Australia costs US$114. Ridiculous.

Wow, that is  :ye_gods:.

Is the price of games in Australia tax related, a legacy pricing issue from when the Aussie $ was weaker/US $ stronger, or something else?

Depends on the popularity/ availability of the game, too.  FF re-releases were selling for $5 less as used than new if you could find them almost two years later.   The God of War collection is only $3 less used vs new right now, too, and that's been out about a year.  (Wife wanted to look at the 3ds yesterday so it's fresh in my mind.) 

I've seen some gaming sites try to break down why it costs so much, but actual publishers remain completely quiet on the issue.

It isn't tax-related, and I expect there to be a bit of an import-related cost added to the bottom line. However, not that much. There's also some talk on Australia's  parallel import restrictions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_import), but I don't entirely buy that either given that games actually manufactured in Australia end up costing less outside of Australia.

There's also an argument that operating a games store in Australia costs more than operating one in the US due to things like a higher minimum wage, so games have to cost more. I doubt that too - EB would shift a lot more units if they dropped the price of their games that would likely more than offset that price reduction on total revenue.

In Australia I've traditionally paid $70 - $80 for games going back to Amiga days iirc. So I think this increased cost is a historical effect from when the $AU was in the US$0.70 range - we've always paid more.

On one hand, it's pure profit chasing - there's a limited amount of competition in the market and the consumer is used to paying it, so gouge, gouge, gouge. On the other, the expectation was that the $AU would never go over US$1, or that it is going to drop sharply in the future. So dropping prices now would see a backlash when the exchange rate isn't so favourable and prices rose from $60 a title to $80 - it'd still be lower than the $110, but that's not the anchor point most buyers would be thinking of.

In a more general sense, Australian retailers are all complaining that consumers are importing products rather than buying locally. The problem there is that for books, for games, for electronics equipment et al it is cheaper to have them imported than to buy them locally.

I wonder if Canada sees a lesser version of the same thing, since their dollar was a bit weaker than the US for a long time. I know that books always had a higher Canadian price listed on them.

We've generally had about a $10 premium on game prices for 15+ years in Canada and that seems to have remained the same at brick-and-mortar stores despite the looney moving up to parity and then some. 

Anything available digitally is good now though.  Nothing to move across the border, the credit card exchange isn't bad, and there is never any release date issues or issues with differing code or censorship/localization nonsense.  I paid the same $50 the US guys did for Rift even after the exchange.  Steam is excellent for this as well.

I'm pretty sure (at least from when I lived down there) that the reason is much simpler than what you think.  The prices were set for when the AU$
 was worth much less than the US$, and now that the US$ and AU$ have come to parity they never adjusted the price (because it gives them more profit without doing any more work, but the average Australian sees no price difference unless they calculate how much it would cost to import it).

There's no other reason for it, since I would buy games from the UK and have it shipped to AU for much less than the retail stores had it for, there's no way publishers can't get decent shipping rates themselves in bulk.  It's a pure profit money grab.

It's kind of a legacy issue, but it's more related to the fact that we're a big fucking island isolated well away from our cultural neighbours. Before the internet, there was no way to get anything other than at retail, or old-school mail order. So we got fucked hard by the retailer oligopoly. They're currently bitching in the media about how more and more people buying from overseas is hurting local (retail) jobs. The kinds of local jobs they didn't give a shit about when they stoped buying locally-produced items and manufactured goods and started to gouge us by buying low-selling high from Chinese, etc suppliers. (Hence our local manufacturing base pretty much doesn't exist anymore).

So a legacy not so much related to the dollar, but to them wanting to maintain the status quo in regard to (almost all) consumer goods, which is where KallDrexx's point comes in.

Even on those, the markdown is much more significant buying from the UK rather than locally.

The steam mark-down on old games can be pretty good too.

It's also because Australian retail rent is insane. Something I only found out when retailers were trying to explain the costs. A shopping centre store in the Australian suburbs has the same sort of rent as a store in New York or London apparently, with a much smaller number of customers. Tie that in with an exclusive distributor and everyone taking a nice big cut. That's still their problem though, if the costs are so high they should have been adapting online selling and parallel importing ages ago but they didn't really need to compete with anyone.

Of course the distributor pushes the retailer to make steam match retail price on some of the big name games (which is part of the reason I didn't buy Fallout or Borderlands). But that should end once retail is marginalised.

On top of which the landlord has it in the contract that they get to see the retailer's accounting books before any rent review.

And in news about Gamestop buying Impulse (remember that?), some indie devs are dropping Impulse due to it.

http://www.industrygamers.com/news/gamestop-purchase-pushing-away-impulse-developers/


How much of Impulse's lineup consists of indie devs again?

I thought it was all indie devs, or at least a sizeable portion of it.

I didn't know Gamestop still sold pc games. Why would anyone bother with that place? Steam, GOG, maybe Amazon for the rare non-Steam release.

I think I have a couple Impulse sale buys, but I wouldn't know because I just check my Steam library when looking for things to play.

I went by there the other day to check, and (I am seriously not kidding here) they had a shelf labelled "Blizzard" with a bunch of Blizzard titles on it, another similar setup for Call of Duty.  And that was it, as far as I could see.

Which makes it kind of puzzling why they decided to grab Impulse in the first place, but whatever.

Buying the infrastructure that's already in place, as I am sure they also heard how much $$ Steam made last year.

Now they can sell you Call of Duty online as well.

More like re-sell the same copy of Call of Duty to everyone. They will justify it by calling it "future used" copies.

I don't blame indie devs bailing on Impulse, there is no reason to wait for the other shoe to drop - we know how it will turn out.

The thing that pisses me off the most about Steam is actually the Trio of Team Fortress 2/Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 - TF2 being by far the worst of them.

What's the deal with all of the constant fucking huge patches on these titles? TF2 seems to have a 500mb-1gb patch every week or two at the most. I know they have an endless stream of stupid hats in the game now, but I can't see how or why that takes such huge patches to add in.

The patches I get have been a lot smaller than that, from what I've noticed. Something is corrupt somewhere and causing you to need to redownload stuff I would guess from a quick peek at their forums.

I wonder if they'll untie Sins of a Solar empire from Impulse, so I can go back to playing it. 

I'm getting ready to stick impulse into my spam filter.  I've gotten something from them every day this week.

That's really the win for gamers, imo. If Stardock will finally put their games on Steam, I might actually get around to playing one. Haven't since GalCiv 1.

I believe this is indicative of source based game, updating even a small thing on the map will require the entire thing to be downloaded again.

Considering the smack Brad Wardell's been talking about Steam this past week, the chances of that happening are still hovering around nil.