For the longest time StarDock was known for their myriad Windows GUI tweak utilities, then in February of 2008 they dropped “Sins of a Solar Empire” which IMHO is one of the best RTS games ever made, and although Sins didn’t get the hype it deserved at launch it didn’t take long for the gaming community at large to sing it’s praises, thus thrusting Stardock into the spotlight as a top tier game developer. Four months after the release of Sins Stardock rolled the dice again, drifting even further away from their roots and launched Impulse, a content delivery system of the same ilk as Steam, or Direct 2 Drive.

One of the best things about Stardock is that they release their games DRM free. This gives them a lot of street cred with hardcore gamers, unfortunately you cannot run a business on street cred alone. Some of the first statistics from their most recent release, “Demigod”, showed a 5:1 pirated to legit ratio. The fact that a torrent for “Demigod” was available online prior to the retail release is sure to have been the catalyst for the mass illegal downloading of that game, and although most copies were illegal they still communicated with Stardocks servers which caused quite the fiasco for an ill equipped server farm the day of launch. All of the top tier review sites had the same review, all of them gave iterations of this statement: “Great Game, but I cannot recommend it due to the net code failure.”

The vessels by which gamers are comfortable purchasing games online already existed at the time of Impulse’s launch, and as much as I like Stardock because of Sins, I think they’re headed down the wrong track with Impulse. Had they forgone Impulse and licensed “Demigod” sales through D2D I believe that A) They would have sold more copies due to the exposure and B) They would have cut down on Piracy by using D2D’s version of DRM. I suppose there is something to be said though about Stardock wanting to control their content from creation to distribution, but given the delivery power and volume of gamers that already reside at D2D and Steam I think that while it’s a noble cause it is a bit short sighted.