That would be free on Steam. Runic (Torchlight) and the makers of Natural Selection 2 are doing this. They sell Steam keys through their own website and keep 100% of the money.

impulse was running 15% off with a code last week i think.  not that it stopped me from spending 20$ at valve.  sorry stardock.

Interesting timing for the Sales.  Impulse has it's birthday sale, and Steam has the largest run of discounts in the platforms history.

In any case, I have to agree that there are some fantastic deals on here that you'd be crazy to miss out on.

It's a Steam exclusive because Stardock is unwillig to sell it on Impulse. Steamworks doesn't mean it can't be sold anywhere else, in fact Direct2Drive carried Steamworks games like Dawn of War 2 and Empire: Total War for a long time until they (and GamersGate and Impulse) started to boycott Steamworks in the uprising of the Modern Warfare 2 release. Their boycott failed, more publishers then ever are making Steamworks games (Fallout: New Vegas, Kane & Lynch 2, Worms Reloaded, Civilization 5, etc.). There is no point in continuing the boycott besides forcing their own customers to buy at Steam if they want a digital distributed version of the game. And i have yet to understand why Brad Wardell and the others are doing this.

I do fully understand their situation, i just think they are making a big mistake.

No, Impulse is forcing customers to use Steam when they are not offering the game on Impulse. They can't change the fact, that developers love Steamworks and are going to continue to use it. As i said, their boycot failed. Now they have two options. A: They can pretend that their is no Steamworks, their are no Steamworks games and try to hide the biggest games of the year from their customers. Or option B: Sell the games and try to compete with Steam by offering lower prices.

From a customers perspective:

Option A: If Impulse doesn't offer Civilization 5 i just go to Steam and buy it from there, leaving all my money at Valve.

Option B: If Impulse is offering Civilization 5 and i get the exact same version with Steam Cloud, Achievements, Auto-Updates and so on, the deciding factor will be the price. And why would i buy Civ 5 on Steam if it is 3 or 5 bucks less on Impulse?

Brad Wardell always talks about competition and that's exactly what competition should look like. Of course, their is alway plan A. Just bury your heads in the sand and maybe Steam is going away on its own. This sounds like a very wise business decision...

Guest83,

Here's a simplified example to illustrate why Impulse, GamersGate and others are taking a stand against Steamworks games.

Imagine you go to Mom & Pop Electronics Store and buy WidgetX.  As soon as you bring WidgetX home and begin to use it, a Mega Electronics Store opens up across from your house that also sells WidgetX, along with many of the same products you could get at Mom & Pop Electronics.  On top of that, every time you use WidgetX, Mega Store might toss a promotion at you for WidgetY or WidgetZ.  All of a sudden, you have a store that offers you many of the same products as Mom & Pop, only it's right there across the street.  They even promote products directly to you from time to time.

Would you still drive over to Mom & Pop, or would you just go across the street to Mega Store?

What incentive is there for anyone but Mega Store to sell WidgetX if this is what always happens?

Selling a Steamworks game, that bundles the Steam client (and store by extension) might get us sales in the short-term, but it would be harmful in the longrun.  Why buy a Steamworks game anywhere but Steam if every other store just sends you there in the end anyway?  Would Target sell product vouchers to redeem at WalMart?

Also, your continued assertion that we should just sell a Steamworks title for a few bucks less than Steam simply doesn't work.  Publishers and developers set the pricing of their games to be consistent across all sales locations (retail, digital etc).  We could not simply cut a few dollars off of the price, that's now how things work.

I understand that from the outside, these kinds of things can appear arbitrary, especially to those who aren't actually involved in the process, but these decisions are not reached lightly, and we don't sacrifice long-term stability for short-term dollars. 

And how will NOT selling Steamworks games help you in the long run?

But that's exactly the situation right now. You are sending everyone who wants to buy a Steamworks game to Steam. Again, you are acting like your customers don't know Steam exists and if you are not offering Steamworks games, they will never know. This is just not the case. People are buying on Impulse because of the exclusives, and the hardcore group because of loyalty. None of this will change if you are going to sell Steamworks games.

Than publishers dictating the prices are the problem. Brad Wardell keeps talking about how important competition is and i fully agree. But why having multiple digital distribution services at all if customers are never going to profit in terms of lower prices?

Yes, but I don't think Stardock or any other online distributor can make their own price for a Steamworks game.  A steamworks game, developed with steamworks with Valve's licensing and distribution arrangements can't just be priced by anyone arbitrarily.  Any other distributor would be basically be some kind of big Steam Affiliate member, like those Put our banner in your site and earn affiliate points per click!!! schemes.  They'd be driving traffic, clicks and revenue to the Steam store.  And, unlike those affiliate programs, it would be for free.

Just having the app on one's machine has little to do with it. When you run a steamworks game, you've got Steam front and center every time you play, with "news" (their term for sales promotions) popping up when Steam starts unless otherwise disabled, Steam branding in the MP/Achievements interfaces, etc. Selling a title that promotes a competitor's store and maintains customer awareness like that is very bad business--rather than simply not gaining customers, it may cause you to actually *lose* customers.

Steam doesn't mind at all if those games are sold elsewhere because *every* copy has Steam advertising built in, so they win either way. The "least loss" option for competitors right now is to simply not play along at all; the only winning option for us is to get publishers on board with a reseller-neutral platform, which is exactly what we're working to do.

Not at all, considering a lot of people don't like Steam simply because it's intrusive, not because they don't like its functionality.

In my experience, most people don't like being ad-bombed on their own machine. Many just don't realize that they can disable it and wind up tolerating it anyway.

They price slow-moving products below the impulse-buy (ha) threshold (with a couple of first party titles or older third party AAA games to make it less obvious what they're doing), and people gobble them up just because they're cheap, not because they want them, or even care to play them. You feel that you got a great deal because of the low price, but you've basically handed Steam $5 for nothing.

That's the power of marketing--get people to think they're getting a steal while you whittle their money away. Good move for Steam's bottom line, but only superficially good for the consumer.

Sadly, you can't really fight Steam using their tactics: they have an important lead. You really need another ground for the battle.

"I want game X but it costs too much, so I'll wait for a sale" is a perfectly logical and valid stance; you're looking out for your own interests as a consumer.

"Game Y is only $5! I don't really care about it but I'll buy it anyway because it's so cheap!" is the sort of behavior that is common in these huge sales, and are what they're counting on. They're taking advantage of the classic shopping fallacy of "saving by spending". Seeing something for far below market price skews its value in the mind, and you wind up buying something you won't use anyway (without respect to whether it's good or not; as you say, people may just not have time for it, and it being cheap won't change that)--quite the opposite of saving.

From your own links: