TotalGaming.net is Transitioning to Impulse

Just to clarify:

Only games currently available through TG.net will be available for token purchases in the future?

If this is the case, and those individuals with tokens remaining can't find anything they wish to purchase, what options remain for disposal of remaining tokens?

Only the games made available through the TotalGaming.net website can be used for token purchases.  There are a number of games still upcoming that will be good for tokens.

I have a single token left on this system, and none of the games costing a single token are interesting to me. If I won't be able to buy new tokens and none of the new stuff coming down the pike will cost a single token, does that mean I am stuck like chuck?



Also, will there be something like the token system on the new Impulse site? I for one loved the ability to buy things cheaper with the tokens and will miss that option if its not impemented on the new Impulse system.




Ken Daae
(Once and Future Fan of TG.Net)

I only have one token left too.

Can you please allow us to convert our tokens to discount coupons on Impulse?

I think that'd be really swell!

edit: It is a shame on no tokens, only way I can pre-order since my Switch/Maestro card isn't accepted at the store! I was hoping to quickly buy 5 more tokens to pre-order Demigod but now I'm stuck with the one.

Been around since Drengin.net and currently have also only single token left...

While I can't say for certain there won't be any new 1 token games added, it's probably unlikely, in which case you're stuck. Impulse will not use a token system.  Part of the ongoing problem of getting new games added is that publishers/developers didn't like that business model, so it's going away forever.  People at large just didn't "get" the token concept anyway (it was a point of constant confusion).

We're still discussing what else may be possible in terms of coupons, etc. but I don't have any details yet.

if Impulse is to eventually replace Stardock Central, will we be able to download previously purchased games from Impulse as well, or will we still need to keep Stardock Central installed?

e.g. i have pre-ordered Demigod and it shows up in Impulse, but none of my previously purchased games do. Also, Demigod does not show up in Stardock central

All of your purchased games will appear in Impulse. The reason why they haven't yet is because we haven't made them live before late this afternoon.

Demigod and all new games will only appear in Impulse. We will not be supporting them on SDC.

I'm just curious...

When gaming transitions to Impulse will their no longer be any membership system as their currently is under totalgaming?

So no yearly subs like under Drengin, No token discounts as under tg.net, just a digital store which we can choose to buy games through if we want? (i.e. there will be no advantage to being a 'repeat' customer or frequent purchaser?)

I guess Stardock is trying to open things up for third-parties to invest in their system, but still, Stardock has traditionally demonstrated they value their customers through such subscription or token economy purchases.... Feels like the end of an era, or, maybe, Stardock have something up their sleeves for their Impulse driven gaming service which we haven't heard about yet?

There's nothing like that at the current time. The problem is that most publishers simply refuse to accept such systems, which is what's kept most higher profile titles off our digital store. There will almost certainly be special sales and coupon offers from time-to-time, however.

Hi all,

I just wanted to give a quick update on upcoming token-purchasable games for TotalGaming.net members.  Coming soon will be Kalypso Media's Imperium Romanum - Wilds of Germania.  This is a micro-expansion pack for Imperium Romanum that will cost $5.99 or 1 Token.  I hope to have this live today.

Also coming up is a new adventure game from Lighthouse Interactive called Belief & Betrayal.  This title will cost $29.99 or 3 Tokens; I hope to have this live early next week on TGN.

For those who don't use Tokens, they will both be on Impulse today.  (For those wondering, the reason for the delay for TGN is because I have to build the game pages here manually, so it takes a lot longer to put stuff up.) 

While I havent had a chance to download Impulse and I didt really use the Token system that I can remember. I do hope that the ease of use and straight foward use of TGN will be apparent when I fire up Impulse. The webpage itself looked way too busy. I like the interface that TGN uses. Very simple and looks great.

Why can't we just archive our games that we bought for SDC via TGN and move on without being forced to use you parent company's new software? I bought Demigod the day it was released. Until today, and the original post was still only June 11th, I knew nothing of TGN getting scuttled for Impulse. I did not even know about Impulse until last week.

My condolences about you missing me buying a bunch of tokens to get a few games I wanted before you closed. You're loss, I am not buying them with cash now. Tell your vendors you goofed and lost them money by poor planning. I am not even sure how I barely found this forum... new items.. whatever.. to read and post. It was never on my SDC control panel to easily find. I bet a large chunk of your users are like me : They like the games, they buy the games, they read what is put in front of them as important when they do updates, and move on. Digging important information into a corner is bad. bad. bad. m'kay? Most people avoid forums like the plague.

A final question on archiving : Do we need to keep a copy of SDC around with our archives and install it in whole whenever we want to install one of our purchased products in the future after TGN is gone, or will a better utility.. or just normal executable setup version of them.. become available?

I agree wholeheartedly with Splatterbug!

I buy your games; read the emails etc and just play, enjoy and occasionaly check for updates.

I really don't feel the need for ego enhancement by endless posting on pointless forums/blogs/whatever! They are time wasting, flame ridden, churlish wastelands of frustrations.

As to the Token system; while I can empathise with Stardocks' wish to expand etc - I fail to see how they expect to retain support of all of their preceeding members (and bear in mind, we pay your salaries...) when they essentially are planning to "STEAL" the money we all committed to buying Tokens. I have 2 currently and was trying to find where the "Buy more Token" link disappeared to, when I stumbled over the posting reference.
I am not some frustrated shopaholic looking for a way to spend money; I want VALUE for my money - it is too damn hard to come by! - Thus Yarlen's suggestion to basically use your Tokens on anything that matches your balance is downright rude - and patronisingly insulting.

I also admired Stardock for its refusal to get caught up in the American model, which emphasises greed mostly, (on the Major Publishers parts at least), where all the "little" innovators have been swalled up by mindless corporations bent on profits not customer satisfaction. The basic premise being get on the bandwagon of the latest gimmick - screw playability et al. If you are planning to makes "Buckets of Money" by signing up the "Majors" - then giving everyone credit on the site for our unused tokens should not be an issue! After all, you have had the use of OUR MONEY for whatever time it has been - months or even a year or more - so in essence you have been funded by a huge pool of of NO interest business finance. In Australia, if you pulled a stunt like that (essentially defaulting on your loans) and merrily continuing on, it would mean Legal responses for "Trading while Insolvent"; including jail time for the Directors in some cases.

Now, I have no legal knowledge of Europe in general and Germany in particular - but this all smells like last weeks fish!

There's nothing more insulting to any employee than to have someone say, "WE pay YOUR salaries!"

I wish the token system had stayed too, but I don't think that SD is committing a cardinal sin by changing their business model. And, I think they could survive fine if I wasn't personally buying a game once in a while to "pay their salary", too.

I think the design of impulse is slick. What I haven't seen mentioned by anyone is the value of having a program that is a bit more reliable than SDC was at times - or so I hope. So far it seems quite reliable and it has a couple of features I found useful immediately, even if I don't care about blogging and such, either.

Gang, we are not screwing you over. How anyone can claim that with a straight face is beyond me. Your tokens will not expire, we will still be adding some new games to TGN, and you can use your tokens on them if you want. Same as always. The only thing that's changed is that we're not selling new tokens because we need to ramp down this business model.

We are also looking into giving people the option of turning their tokens into a "gift card" of sorts, that you can use towards anything we sell. However, this is going to take us quite a bit of time to develop as we don't have anything like it at the moment. 

The token business model was not popular with customers (most found it confusing) or with developers (they found it confusing and were simply unwilling to even try it - one publisher even demanded 100% of the revenue). It was not sustainable moving forward and we had to change it.

People, so long as you are telling us that we CANNOT use our tokens to buy what WE want, you ARE screwing us. Find a way to allow us to use our tokens for what we want. I wanted to buy Twilight Of The Arnor, but I have only two tokens of the three needed. What you are telling me is that I have to pay full price (when the only reason I bought tokens was the price break on multiples), and take a chance that you will come up with something I want before you just decide to end your "service".

I truly hate to say such things to/about a company I've had a lot of respect for, but you have forfeited a lot of that respect. Find a way to earn it back. What's wrong with saying "two tokens is 2/3 of the price, pay the rest with a credit card?". Don't screw us, please? Another method, using the current system, is to allow a one-time purchase of a token or tokens (say up to three) and force the user to use them now (within 2 hours, say). After that, no more tokens for that user.

There are ways out of this where no one get screwed (at least not badly).

My god people will cry about anything.

Guess I should find something to dump my other 5 tokens on. And I agree 100% that the token system is confusing and unwieldy. For example I'd like to preorder Demigod but it's 6 tokens and I only 5 which would leaves me with the option of either outright paying for it or buying another 10 tokens so I can get 1 more to preorder Demigod.

Some kind of way to convert them to discounts or something for Impusle games would be cool. I would like to be able to, for example, pay for $35 of the $45 for Demigod with tokens and the rest with cash (numbers are arbitrary examples).

Wakey, wakey, FalseMyrmidon! Were you reading the posts? You CANNOT buy 10 more tokens, because they won't SELL you any more! I've seen a "you're stuck" post from Yarlen, when someone asked about what happens if Stardock doesn't put up any games we like for the number of tokens we have. I've seen a vague promise to, someday, maybe, make arrangements for a gift certificate.

Yes, I'll "cry" when someone tries to walk off with my hard-earned cash! Darn straight! I'll do more than cry, if I keep seeing Yarlen's brand of customer service as the only input from the company.

It'd be a shame if the sharks got it all because Stardock continued with an attitude like the one I've seen from Yarlen. All I want is what I payed for, or (a distant second) my money back.

Can we please relax about this for a bit? Yarlen has stated, in this very thread, that they are looking into a 'solution' for the situation you describe. I think it is reasonable to assume that this is NOT their top priority while launching a new system such as Impulse but I for one am unwilling to assume the worst just yet.

Stardock has gone through a few iterations with Totalgaming and so far the 'veterans' of the system have always come out on top. Let's be patient and see what happens for now.

Personally, I wasn't harping on the removal of tokens. It appears they are trying to find a fair solution, albeit it causing latency for their people with tokens wanting to use them and therefore delaying them getting to spend them.

The problem I see is the last minute conversion without a real public face that it was going to happen, be it on tokens or some new fat-buggy app. I am worried about keeping all my programs archived, so I must now keep an archive of everything. I use the new application and it's buggy. I post a bug thread and some guy chimes in saying he had the same thing happen and they deleted his post, days or a week later a dev says "we'll look into it". Meanwhile, it is the fact the new app cannot update any of my games it detects because it tries to archive them first and blows up.

The new application is a memory pig that forces a fancy wastefull interface style, tons of spam and bandwidth use automatically (I use a sprint aircard and sprint just put a 5GB cap. Thanks for blowing bandwidth in my background.) and lovely at some point I might hit this same cap just trying to get a few of my games fresh, like the new app is looking like it might force me to do.

Point is... give us the games we bought without the new app. Make the archive files a standard install file, or give a simple tool that works with them to install them from archive. Give the users who don't want you new app forced on them a choice to egress, lest you ruin the name of digitial downloading as a viable alternative.

Just by fact of using the new app, you now limit what platform people can use to update/install/archive from when the original program was bought to run on an older OS. I have seen these threads already, or even a modern one like 64bit XP. I have seen those threads also. Cmon. Let people have standalone installations of the games they bought. Otherwise, I am about to find myself never doing a digitial purchase of any kinda gain from anyone since we can't trust these systems and companies anymore.

I see what you mean.
As far as Stardock software is concerned, the archives are just zipfiles renamed to sdc files so you can quite easily just unzip them manually to install. I think at least Galactic Civilization allows you to type in your serial number in the game directly but I'm not sure on all other programs.
I do agree that it would be nice to provide this sort of information or a service for this automatically. Will stardock central completely stop functioning at some point? It still seems to work for me currently. I can understand you don't want to be reliant on one piece of software to enable you to use multiple other pieces of software.

SDC will continue to function for awhile longer, however, newer games' archive files won't be compatible with it since Impulse is using a different compression scheme.

The Impulse archive functionality is not good.  It's slow, it's uninformative, and just not cool.  I am not happy with it at all and it's in the queue for an overhaul with Phase 2 of Impulse in a month or so.  Apart from its slowness and lack of coolness, however, it works pretty much the same as SDC's did - so as long as you have a copy of Impulse around, you can always restore an archive from it (and I believe Impulse does - or will - restore SDC archives too).

For those who want to purchase individual tokens, they will go on sale on Monday. More info with details for how this will work can be found here: http://tgnforums.stardock.com/315721/page/1/#1797720

I was shocked when I came to buy some tokens today. Now, more shocked at how poorly this change was communicated. Like others here, I had to poke around to even find out what was going on. For years now Stardock, and then TGN, were my first stop for new games. I suppose I'll need to check out Impulse. Is there a link to it?

I have a small business, which I opened several years ago b/c I got tired of the boss. What I found was, sometimes one boss is much better than a horde of angry customers. A business can dry up pretty fast if it doesn't treat its customers well. If the business goes away, so do the jobs. So, our patronage does pay salaries. But "we pay your salary" is not a threat, its an opportunity.

As for the changes, I won't whine. Wardell and his crew have always been a good bunch. I can't imagine them going evil on us now.

Does Impulse run on *nix through WINE? I can't find any information on this from Stardock, and the system requirements for Impulse are vague. It only mentions you need Windows XP or Vista (plus the usual hardware requirements) but it does not say whether it is compatible with WINE (or ReactOS for that matter). SDC did run on *nix through WINE, but I have the eerie feeling Impulse will not (already complains on Win XP about missing IE7).

WineHQ AppDB lists Impulse with a garbage rating: http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=7573
Stardock Central had a Platinum rating with the 1.0 release of WINE.