Oh, Steam is well on the way to a monopoly in the digital distribution computer game market, make no mistake. I've been around the block enough to know when a superior distribution channel comes out with must-have goods that the usual outcome is eventual monopoly. That's why things like the FTC exists, and why a company in a monopoly position have to obey stricter laws than companies in a free market do.

I hope everyone here realizes that a monopoly merely means that an individual company has gained enough market dominance to control pricing and distribution.

Why indeed? A lot of people are thinking the same thing.

I love Steam and have no issue, 2K DRM all their games and Steam is the best and least annoying type of DRM for me so I don't really mind or care.

This is very worrying for me. I like steam, and I've bought plenty of games on it, but it's quickly becoming clear that they're intent on forcing their competitors out of the market with exclusivity deals. The end result of this will be less choice and higher prices for us - the key turning point (which may already have been reached) will be when instead of steam having to offer things to developers/publishers to get their titles on to steam, the roles are reversed and steam are offered things for hosting the titles. That then means they'll be able to demand exclusivity from everyone which in turn destroys any competition. With the competition gone they'll then be able to demand much higher prices/not do as many deals.

Platforms like impulse will have an uphill battle since as long as steam has a wider range of titles they're going to be more popular, and probably grow their customer base at a faster rate than impulse. This in turn allows them to get even more titles than impulse, and the effect just magnifies. Maybe if stardock was able to release more 'must-have' games (like SoaSE) they'd have a chance of  stopping this, but with Brad taking a break from creating games the rate of such games will probably decrease as well.

I just hope the anti-competition rules of countries where steam has servers will be sufficient to try and prevent this, but I doubt it given how far behind the times most countries legislation tends to be wrt this sort of technology.

Well, Stardock is already offering this deal to publishers with Impulse. But none had accepted it.

Roll on the floor as much as you like, it IS an inconvenience. I mean it takes 2 seconds to put the CD in the drive too. You can even leave it there, and people still  dislike it.

De gustatis non disputandum. I don't like it, and many people don't like it. Just accept it.

Wrong. Impulse DRM scheme (ont time activation) doesn't need me to do anything, while Steam in Steamworks forces me to close it. It rather proves the Steam requirement is a bad implementation as is.

I think Impulse can survive even a Steam monopoly.  Worst case, it ends up being Stardock Central again.

What Stardock needs to do:

a) I think they should buy out Gamersgate to get their catalogue.

Start undercutting Steam on price, even if it means eating profit.  If Steam sells something for 50 you sell it for 45- tell the publisher they'll get the royalties if it was 50, and force Steam into a price war.

Stardock isn't super-dependent on making Impulse financially successful. Their skinning software is where they get their money from, mostly, I think. Publishing games and Impulse is, I think, more of something Brad wanted to do to help improve upon Steam's concept as a competitor rather than him trying to create massive revenue and overturn Stream and make lots of monies. 

If Impulse fails and dies and eventually only distributes Stardock games, I think Brad would shrug and reduce Impulse back to just Starkdock utilities and software. It's still a nice client... 

The question becomes whether Stardock is afraid a one Valve future would hurt their way of doing business.  I honestly don't know if it would.  I wouldn't want to put out with Valve DRM on non-Stardock games though, I'd probably just move more to console gaming in that case, and buy cheap laptops and get out of computer gaming except for old games.

Have you considered putting say, Sins on steam, then making it use Impulse and allowing the Steam keys to be used standalone on Impulse (Mount and Blade does this)?  Was that rejected by Valve?

Impulse is unlikely to fail, other publishers realize the value of getting their stuff on multiple platforms (see Capcom).  This is an area Impulse NEEDS to improve on fast- and hasn't done a good enough job of IMO.  Gamersgate still has a better overall catalogue.

That's exactly what competition should look like! Stardock would get the money and (in case of a Steamworks game) Valve would have to provide download servers and support. But what is Stardock actually doing? They complain about Steamworks, lie about their Weekend Deals and refuse to sell (or even buy privately) games like Modern Warfare 2 or Civilization V. That's childish and doesn't make any sense from a business standpoint. Does Stardock really think they can somehow "hide" Steam from their customers?

The issue people have with having to use the CD is not the time it takes to put it into the drive.  I hate CD's because you can lose them and you can't have multiple CD's in at once.  The time it takes to put it in the drive is completely negligible.  Plus, it takes a lot longer than 2 seconds to change cd's for many people with the location of their tower, their cd's, and the load time.  The fact you have an issue with spending 2 seconds to close a process is still absurd (which you could just keep running, unless you're running Vista on 512 mb ram)

And I'm wrong how?  You're ENTIRE argument is that you don't want to spend 2 seconds to close a process.. a process that you don't even have to close since it idles at 6 mb.  You've proved nothing and not addressed the actual issue of why I said your second point was why steam was good.  It's because it prevents piracy like no-cd hacks, which, again, I'll type out:  Steam games do not need the cd in to run.  

A price war would be a lose- lose for Steam and Impulse.  If Impulse undercuts Steam, Steam will merely drop their prices as well.  Steam has the power to price lower and force Impulse out of business if it would come to that.  If not, it merely means both companies now have lower prices with the same market share as before.  Hopefully that made sense.. I'm on heavy pain meds and it's 7:30 a.m., need to go to sleep 

I will venture a guess that many of the people who claim they won't buy civ 5 because of steam... will buy civ 5 anyway.  How do i know this? Because its the internet, and 9 times out of 10 most forum comments are entry to a bandwagon, which in this case seems like some seeded commercial rebellion. 

To those who claim this is anti competitive, i can assure you its not.  2k games had many options (impulse for one), but they volunteered to use steamworks knowing full well what that entailed .  However, what this will do is allow the price to remain at the sellers discretion because there wont be competition trying to drive down prices, which is a bummer.

My opinion on steamworks drm:  I'd prefer no drm to it, but considering most publishers require drm, id much prefer steamworks over the other alternatives.  It seems like all other drm implementations have been draconian and completely limiting to the experiance.  Steamworks allows you to play on any computer you have steam installed to, and you can install it as many times as you so please.  The only thing you cant do is give it to a friend, which is the underlying purpose of drm anyway, they get their money, you get your game!

Anyway...

Even if stardock sold civ 5, id still buy it from steam.  I really enjoy their platform.

If they sell it for five bucks less and provide you with a key to register your game on Steam (so it has exactly the same features as a native Steam version), why would you buy it from Steam then?

And a big win for us customers. That's how you fight a monopoly, not by complaining and refusing to sell Steamworks enabled games.

Id assume the game would have the same features,  i had mentioned platform as in the steam platform.  I really enjoy their instant message (with voip mind you) and community features, achievements are fun and im an achievement whore, and it lets me access all its features while in game.  Love it!  Also, when i backup a game in impulse, reformat and re-install windows, it doesn't allow me to restore those backup images as it complains "using the wrong windows" or something along those lines, i also cant move those backup images to to other PC's and install from them like i can on steam.  To me that's a HUGE downside.

Impulse, you want my money for more games then sins?  Improve your platform.  Want developers to pick you up rather then the competition? improve your platform.  If you argue that developers prefer steam because of their larger number, then attract more users and give developers more incentive. 

Don't blame steam for having a good product, and don't blame 2k games for preferring it.

Besides my biased opinion's, civ games are great games. Buy it because its a great game.

I've been considering for a while whether it was wise for D2D, Stardock, and Paradox to boycott Steamworks games.

I get their point of trying to persuade developers not to use Steamworks. But I wonder if that by selling the game on Impulse, they'd actually discourage Valve from trying to gain a monopoly on DRM. The money goes to Stardock/Publisher X, but Steam gets stuck with the burden in terms of bandwidth and hosting updates. It's almost like Stardock and others would be a tapeworm- siphoning off the food but living in the host (Steam).

I'm sure publishers would be looking at the sales of games, and if Impulse and others could move a sizable percentage of it, developers would be more inclined to use Impulse Reactor as a way to pick up those gamers that refuse to use Steam.

But Brad is the ultra-rich head of a successful company, not me. I've just put out my line of thinking- perhaps he has a better understanding of the situation and sees something I simply do not. I do recognize that D2D once was willing to carry Steamworks games and has since stopped- perhaps there is truth to the fact that they're essentially signing up customers to a competitor. But I simply cannot imagine there are many, if any, gamers who have heard of Impulse but not Steam.

Though if Valve was truly interested in not squeezing out the middle-man, they could easily produce a Steam-lite to be bundled with games. While it would work as DRM in terms of authenticating games and have an overlay, the store simply wouldn't be bundled within it. I'd be pretty ok with Steam if that was the case.