I think part of the thing a lot of people don't understand is what the MOTIVATION in creating Impulse was.

Steam, Direct2Drive and others pushing prices down and having these sales is a big reason why Impulse exists in the first place.

Personally, as the CEO of Stardock, I can tell you that I would have much preferred that someone else had created Impulse or something like it.  But they didn't and Steam and all had half a decade to stop charging consumers $30 for older titles.  When there were rumors that the various "digital retailers" were thinking of increasing their take from 30% to 40% that was the last straw for me.

I only starting developing games in the first place because I was unhappy with computer AI in games (this was back in the 90s).  

We did the Gamers Bill of Rights largely in response to the craziness with copy protection and other annoying things that were occuring in the industry.

And we are doing Impulse because (and I think everyone here can agree it's pretty obvious now) that without viable competition, PC games sold digitally would continue to be sold at crazy prices, developers given relatively little incentive to lower prices and just generally not treated as well as they could (ask indie developers the treatment they get NOW versus 2 years ago thanks to competition).

Steam has some titles at better deals than Impulse and vice versa.  Heck, Direct2Drive had a crazy sale a few weeks ago where a bunch of titles were being sold for something like $5.  

There is only one winner in this: The PC Gamer.

Ask those Console zealots about the deals they're getting for the holidays..oh wait, they aren't. 

When I see Steam or Direct2Drive or whomever doing aggressive sales on PC games I think: Excellent!  

In other words: Steam and others having 40% off sales on AAA titles is a major reason we wanted to do Impulse in the first place.

The alternative would have been the continuing migration of PC gamers to the console.

I heard about steam and D2D years ago, but you are right, they were still selling 5-10 year old games, many of which I had on my shelf already, at full price when the retailers clearanced them out years ago. It was a complete ripoff which pretty much soured me to the whole digi thing for a fairly long time. Now I am sort of trickling into digi realm all because of sales and somewhat convenience. Until Charter shapes up and tells why my download is crap despite what i pay for, I will probably still reach for a disc before digi copy when it comes to similar prices.

Between the two, I more comfortable with and prefer Impulse over Steam. I won't let Steam startup with my OS at this point, but Impulse is now because of the daily sales and so far, no issues with that. I have to constantly update Steam for whatever reasons, especially the week of release for L4D 2 which I don't even own. I don't know if their games are so incestial with Steam that everyone has to update for their game issues, but its annoying.

EA, Ubisoft have had big sales this holiday too but with all their sales comes questions about their digi store and that POS Download manager EA uses. I think I have a version of it with the Sims games, but the currently EA Download Manager doesn't even work with windows 7 and they might have changed it but i thought they were the ones that wanted me to pay for privelege of downloading my games again. Hey, we all knew Windows 7 was coming, I don't know why they didnt' bother working on updating their manager sooner, one of the biggest, or maybe the biggest?, PC publishers doesn't even bother to get their download manager ready for Windows 7. WTH?

Anyway, to end the ramble. I like Impulse. I know that shortly after Impulse showed up, we suddenly have real sales again in PC games, and I appreciate that. Now its a matter of money and time because there are deals all over. I just hoped for more from Impulse this holiday season because i want to encourage my friends and family to try it, and for that to happen, I've got have a good reason to get them to do it, and a sweet sale could do the trick. I can tell you my handful of friends use Steam for L4D, and while I tolerate it, they hate it. But Steam's current sale is all over the gaming sites and the deals site and frankly, I don't know if I even have time for another game right now, especially sinc ei expect one on the 25th to show up, but it's fun to look through it.

Heh, I should have added, the consoles got shafted this year, except sales on the consoles themselves, for sure, but man did the Wii get shafted the most. Even when there were cross platform sales, they always left out the Wii version. For shame!

To be honest, I think the migration is going to continue. The sales, etc, might slow it down a little, but I don't think they're going to stop it. People will try to argue this, but I don't think there is any getting around the fact that console gaming is way cheaper than PC gaming.

For $200 I can go get a Wii or an Xbox360. Sure you can get a decent computer for $400, but if you want a top of the line gaming computer, you'll be paying a lot more. And whay about multiplayer? For a console you just need another controller or two. For a PC game, you'll need a second PC, and in some cases a second copy of the game.

It doesn't matter if console games aren't on sale, or don't go on sale as often. Again, I can get a console and 3-4 games cheaper than a PC.

And with a console, I don't have to worry if my graphics card isn't compatible with Game X, or my drivers are out of date, or the game doesn't run on 64-bit OS. Or my console being obsolete in 2 months because something better already came out.

Consoles are just cheaper and offer less hassle, which is why I think their user base will continue to grow, while PC's will shrink.

Now don't get me wrong, I love PC gaming, and there are some genres I will never play on a console (RTS comes to mind) but PC gaming has a looong way to go before it is as easy and cheap as console gaming to start winning people back.

If you buy a PC just for gaming, then yea, that's kind of insane.

But few people I know do that. We get PCs for a host of reasons with playing games one of them. If I can get a good PC game for $10 versus $50 on the console then I'd say advantage PC.

I buy a new computer roughly every 3-4 years. I do my banking on it. When I was in school, i did a lot of work on it. I've done work projects on it. I also make telephone calls, watch television, record television and awhole host of things. PC gaming is thet part that makes me upgrade the most often, but that has slowed down a lot. The build I have now is just about a year old, wasn't top of the line when I bought it, and it cost me under 700 including a monitor, new gaming mouse, and new OS none of which I needed to buy. I could have gone a lot cheaper and been fine, and most games I can still play with high or better settings. A handful of years ago, I'd see it upset after just 6 months. PC gaming has slowed down.

I bought maybe 1-2 games for my console, i buy a new PC game every couple of months and a lot more than that when sales it. I also do MMORPGs. Not a single console game has wanted me to do one of their MMOS.

I've just switched to Windows 7 64 bit, zero, zero problems with my games so far. Even in the 90s, new machines were not obsolete in 2 months, and these days, the run is a lot, lot longer, think a few years. Hell my own gaming machine has more power than xbox 360.

Frogboy already addressed teh money issue and the fact the PC do a lot, a lot more than any console can do. I'll add that as far as RPGs, FPS, and Strategy titles are concerned, the PC still beats the hell out of consoles in terms of gaming experience.

Compared to when I started playing PC games, windows 3.11 where you had to create boot disks for each game to allocate the memory correctly, PC gaming is a lot easier. Hell compared to Win 95 days, where your 450mhz machine simply would not play a game that requires to 500mhz, it's a lot easier. If people run into trouble now, it usually the GPU and that's an easy fix.

If anything, consoles are getting more complex. They got more compotents, more versions than every before. Only nintendo has really stuck to the one version for all methodology and some of their games require the sensor addition to the wii mote to play. You've got to explain to parents that the Xbox 360 wants a yearly stipend for the privlege to play their games online, the cheapest version doesn't come with a harddrive.

PC gaming is getting easier to use and consoles are becoming more complex, from a users point of view. 3-4 years isn't that different from a console's lifespan (so far), and the games are hell of a lot cheaper than consoles, not to mention variety of games and modding. I get agitated enough the PC game industry ignores women, you shift to the console side, and it's even worse except for the Wii.

Well, my original point was about PC gaming vs. console gaming (or it was supposed to be, anyway ) But yes, computers are good for more than just gaming. But consoles are closing that gap. They already let you surf the internet, listen to music, edit pictures, watch movies, etc.

And how many new, AAA games are you going to get for $10? A lot of people buy games of impulse (haha, pun not intended) They're going to say "Wow, Dragon Age looks amazing! I want it right now so I'm in the 'trend,'" not "Wow, Dragon Age looks amazing! I'm going to wait a couple months and hope someone decided to put it on sale, and then I'll buy it, at which point it will no longer be the 'in' game!"

The problem I have with sales in general (not just digital) is that I never have a garantee that the game I want will go on sale. I might have to wait two weeks, or I might be waiting a year before a certain game goes on sale. If most people actually waited for sales to buy games, no one would be buying them on release day.

And for regular, non-sale prices, I can almost garantee you that Amazon will always have the lowest prices. Like right now, Dragon Age is $49.95 on Impulse, $39.99 for the PC version on Amazon, and $44.99 for the Xbox360 version. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_4_10?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=dragon+age+origins&sprefix=dragon+age

I think the only thing that will make PC gaming and digital distribution popular is more competive regular prices, not sale prices.

Ok, that ended up completely off my original topic, but whatever

Never owned a console....never will.

That's not 'quite' true.....I did once have a thingie that plugged into a TV....that played Pong.  I think it was somewhen in the '70s.

I tend to find that 'grownups' use their computers for things OTHER than Gaming [mostly to justify the last expense/upgrade that was thanks to the needs of Gaming....].

All that extra 'bang' you add for your Games just means your work/legitimate stuff is faster and more enjoyable...;)

Do those prices factor in 'door to door'?...;)

You mean shipping? For Amazon, yes, but there is a wait.

Indeed, and that is an excellent point and reason for the existance of Impulse.  But at the same time, the point you awesome peoples at stardock are missing is that we WANT to support Stardock and Impulse to the fullest without sacrificing the excellent deals we can potentially get as gamers!  I, for one, feel dirty when I purchase something on steam that is super cheap, but then appears on Impulse a month later.  But yes, Impulse has done for the Digital Distribution world of Games what Amazon has done for the Retail communities.  Kudos to competion! 

Then there's the 'maybe not'.....

I had just recently ordered several DVDs from the US....and the UK Amazon....sent in 4 packages......

....only 3 arrived....;p

Yeah, Amazon has free shipping on pretty much everything. I don't know about you, but I would be willing to wait a couple days for paying $10 less.

I do not buy this. Yeah, there are multiple versions. But there are only 2 different Xbox360's (used to be three). Compared to the literally hundreds of different configurations for computers. Do I want a desktop, laptop, or netbook? How much HD space? What GPU? CPU? What brand? Which moniter? etc, etc, etc They might be getting more complex, but they have quite a ways to go before they are as complex as PC's.

I have Star Wars: Forces of Corruption. It crashes every single time if you have a 64-bit OS and more than 2 gigs of RAM. And it's a "Games for Windows" game, so it's supposedly been tested to work on Windows. Didn't work on Vista 64, doesn't work on Win 7. 2 months might have been a bit of an exageration, but still, within 6 months for sure there will be something newer and faster and better.

And of course your computer is more powerful than a 360, but that doesn't matter. You just got through saying that your computer can do a bunch of other stuff a console can't (yet) It needs the extra resources. A 360 doesn't have a resource-hogging OS (7 is better than Vista, but still, it uses a lot) no anti-virus in the background, or any of the other multitudes of programs running on your computer at a given time.

That's a matter of opinion. Like I said in my earlier post, I will only play RTS on the PC, but my first FPS was 007 Goldeneye for the N64. Most of my experience with FPS's has been on consoles, and I prefer to play them with a controller. I've played FPS's on both the PC and console, and I still prefer consoles. You can tell me whatever you like about the mouse being more accurate, etc, etc but that's not going to change my opinion.

Basically, PC gamers are being snobs whenever they say such-and-such a genre is only good on the PC. That is not to say, however, that console gamers aren't just as bad. They're worse

And yes, I realize I'm being a total hypocrite. Maybe if a decent RTS ever came out on a console, I'd get it.

Shipping to Australia is far from 'free'....

....that's where I am....;)

Ah, ok. I don't really know what to say about that

Oh, I have no doubt Steam's huge sale is a direct result of increased competition on the digital download front.  And I still won't buy from them, because it's Steam.  I'm just saying if Impulse had half the lineup they had, I'd be broke this Christmas.

This being Steam's 7th Christmas one can imagine they have quite a line up by now.  This being Impulse's second, there's less of a catalog.

But the Impulse deals have been pretty impressive I think. Just depends on what you're looking for.

Originally I wasnt going to preorder Dark Void, but rather wait till it hit the bargain bin, but Impulse did it's 24hr thing and I couldn't resist.  Not really sure why it started working today when It hadn't been working all week, but who am I to argue.  I guess I simply have to keep my computer up all the time so that nothing causes Now to not work again.  Ahh well.  Now if you guys just do the same with Mass Effect 2, I'll be in business!

Not wrong, Narelle...;)

Not wrong, Narelle...;)

I take it the Now promotions are at an end, but can anyone verify this?  I cannot tell if they ended yesterday or if my Now simply is not working again.  It would be better if Now had a show promotions button to that is always on when the "show promotions" box is checked even if there are no promotions available.  At least then it would be distinguishable from when Now has it disabled.  Or simply keep a dedicated "check for promotions" function even if promotions are turned off from automatically popping up.  There just needs to be some way of distinguishing between properly and improperly working software.

Anyway, for now, can anyway verify that there are no more promotions?

Thanks

I take it the Now promotions are at an end, but can anyone verify this?  I cannot tell if they ended yesterday or if my Now simply is not working again.  It would be better if Now had a show promotions button to that is always on when the "show promotions" box is checked even if there are no promotions available.  At least then it would be distinguishable from when Now has it disabled.  Or simply keep a dedicated "check for promotions" function even if promotions are turned off from automatically popping up.  There just needs to be some way of distinguishing between properly and improperly working software.

Anyway, for now, can anyway verify that there are no more promotions?

Thanks

They're coming to an end.  I see Dark Void for 25% off.