We have started rolling out the new Stardock Launcher.  It integrates with Steam and GOG to provide an easy way for us to give our customers quick access to more content.

Here's a screenshot of it in action:

The launcher, btw, is only 470K (kilobytes) in size as we wanted to make sure that it loaded up instantly when you launch the game 

The mission of the launcher is to solve the early adopter dilemma.

Stardock has some of the most loyal fans out there.  But the modern game market punishes loyalty. You buy a game and a few months later, it's on sale or priced much lower.  

When we wrote the GamersBillOfRights years ago, our motivation was that we didn't want our customers to feel like chumps for buying the game rather than pirating it.  Digital distribution is rapidly creating the same problem for early adopters: You buy a game in early access or beta or newly released and you get punished.

This past year, Stardock was one of the worst offenders of not adequately supporting its loyal customers with the pricing of Ashes of the Singularity.  It wasn't intentional. The reality of digital distribution is still something that all of us are having to adapt to: Your game doesn't just compete against other NEW games, you are competing against every other game that has ever been released including competitive games that are fully realized and that has created very strong downward pressure on pricing that was not anticipated. So what could we do?

That answer: The Stardock Rallypoint which first manifests itself as a launcher for our games.

The general idea is pretty simple:

1. When a gamer buys a game that get the launcher
2. When they launch it, we are able to determine when that gamer became a customer
3. The launcher then gives the player free stuff that will later not be free to later customers (i.e. DLC is released for free on the Rallypoint for early adopters and then it becomes normal DLC later for late adopters).
4. The launcher also provides a host of other benefits as we come up with them. Free keys for other products, access to mods, etc.

Best of all, it works with Steam and GOG.  This is a launcher, not a game client.   So it is designed to integrate into Steam and GOG Galaxy rather.  Your Steam achievements and any other data we can get via the API will get incorporated into the launcher which in turn will make your Steam (or GOG) achievements matter even more.  We can tie various special benefits for things like the first player who gets certain Steam achievements.

Let us know what you think.  We also invite you to check out how fast all of it is.  A big part of our engineering effort was to make it super light and fast.