Gamestop acquires Impulse

[Velorath]

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:

In its biggest push yet into the digital game market, major video game retailer GameStop today announced a pending purchase of Stardock subsidiary Impulse Inc., including the Impulse digital delivery service, as well as the acquisition of streaming technology company Spawn Labs.

The Impulse purchase, expected to close in May 2011, will give Gamestop a major foothold in the digital delivery market, and will also include the company's Impulse: Reactor and Impulse: Publisher middleware tools.

Stardock's Brad Wardell estimated Impulse had 10 percent of the PC digital game delivery market in late 2009, with Valve's Steam service taking up a massive 70 percent of the market.

Spawn Labs has been working on a consumer-facing game streaming service since its founding in 2009. Since then, major competitors including OnLive and Gaikai have launched similar services that stream high-definition games run on servers to all manner of internet-enabled devices.

“With these important acquisitions, we will continue to make appropriate investments related to our multichannel strategy. GameStop is uniquely positioned to be the leader in both the physical and digital gaming space," GameStop CEO J. Paul Raines said in a statement.

After establishing a digital business group in 2009, GameStop purchased web game portal Kongregate last year. The company has also been expanding in-store sales of digital content for consoles with promotions including digital pre-order incentives.

[UPDATE: An FAQ on the acquisition posted by Stardock promises no disruption in Impulse service or changes to Impulse accounts in the immediate future. The company says it doesn't expect any layoffs to be associated with the purchase, and notes that Stardock is actually hiring fora variety of positions.]

[Ingmar]

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.

[Strazos]

Just another reason to not use Impulse, I guess. 

[koro]

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.

[Merusk]

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.

[Stormwaltz]

Yeaaaah.

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

[Rasix]

Why would I need anything other than Steam?

[Stormwaltz]

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.

[Amaron]

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.

[Hawkbit]

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. 

[Ingmar]

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.

[Kageru]

Dinosaurs Mating

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.

[schild]

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.

[tgr]

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.

[Azazel]

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. 

[Yoru]

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

[NiX]

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.

[kildorn]

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!"

[Mrbloodworth]

Impulse was bloated and inefficient to run on my systems. 

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

[Sir T]

Impulse was bloated and inefficient to run on my systems.

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.

[Chimpy]

Sounds like Sinij has a disciple.

[Mrbloodworth]

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.

[bhodi]

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)

[Tebonas]

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

[kildorn]

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.

[Rasix]

Steam today, is quite nice. My comments were about early steam.

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).  

[Yegolev]

Maybe I can get Stardock games on Steam now.

[Mrbloodworth]

Steam today, is quite nice. My comments were about early steam.

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.

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.

[kildorn]

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.

[Ingmar]

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

[HaemishM]

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).

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.

[Teleku]

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.

[Azazel]

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.

[Goreschach]

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.

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

[Amaron]

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.

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.