Stardock boss Brad Wardell says "Our estimation is that Steam - as the current market leader - enjoys approximately 70 percent of the overall digital distribution market with Impulse at 10 percent and all others combined at 20 percent in terms of actual dollars generated per month".

While we have our doubts that Stardock's Impulse service is at #2 (surely Direct2Drive is bigger?), Steam's 70% figure is - if it checks out - both interesting and frightening at the same time. That's about the same level of market domination Apple enjoys in the music player scene.

Quick: name another portable music device that's not an iPod. Off the top of your head. Now tell me how many people you know own an iPod compared to a portable music device that's not an iPod.

Exactly.

[via Gamasutra]

In an interview with Shacknews, Wardell was asked if he knew why Microsoft wasn't "showing more leadership" on the PC. Wardell - well, just let the man speak for himself. He's quite comfortable with doing so, after all.

I started out as a big Games for Windows Live advocate. I intended for Elemental to be on Games for Windows Live, but then as we got closer, the Xbox group took it over more and more. And they have things where, oh, if you want to use Games for Windows Live to update your game, you have to go through [their] certification. And if you do it more than X number of times, you have to pay money. It's like, "My friends, you can't do that on the PC."

On the console, I don't have to update my game because an anti-virus program got an update and is now identifying my VB scripts as viruses and I have to apply an emergency patch. That would just add insult to injury. We've had to upgrade our games plenty of times over the years, not because we found some bug, but because some third-party program, or driver, or whatever screwed it up. If Games for Windows Live maintains that strategy and they take over, I'm done. I'm not making PC games. I would be done.

Is he impertinent? Impolite? Merely exaggerating? Maybe, but the man does have a point.

Stardock Interview Part 2: Brad Wardell on PC Gaming [ShackNews via Maximum PC]

That's no accident because developer Stardock's CEO & President, Brad Wardell is way into A Song of Ice and Fire – as am I, and so most of my time with Elemental was spent talking about the marriage alliance system, the story elements and a potential novelization of the game that's currently being negotiated with Del Rey (publisher of A Song of Ice and Fire).

In Elemental, you control a single avatar, called a sovereign, imbued with magic. The sovereign can raise cities, gather armies and command all the resources a Tolkien-esque world would have to win a war (magic, dragons, ancient lore, etc.). The sovereign can also walk around maps and explore dungeons with your armies to acquire even more resources. The goal – as with most strategy games – is to build up enough resources to sustain a well-equipped army or bribe an enemy into being an ally that can lead to total domination of the map – and the death of all the other sovereigns via your army or badass spells.

However, there's more to Elemental's strategy than researching the most powerful spells, buying the best armor or obtaining the most farmland to feed the biggest army. The sovereign can also amass vassal families as a resource. Members of the family can join the army with special stat buffs, be appointed to run cities or married off to other players' vassals to create alliances. Different factors within families affect how well they do each job. For example, a son might be weak in battle, a marriage might be childless so the alliance falls apart, or maybe the daughter is just too unattractive to marry off. Either way, the families loyal to your sovereign evolve throughout the game into various generations – and they might even change sides if you marry off one too many children. Also, they can die and will stay dead.

The world in which Elemental takes place is like J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth in that it has history. Any map you play on is a part of that history, whether it's one of the small ones you could complete in a couple of hours or the massive maps that take months to play. Del Rey helped Stardock put the history of the world together so that no part of the story drags, reads poorly or smacks too much of Tolkien fanfiction.

Beyond that, Elemental is also about accessibility. Wardell said that the game should be able to run on most machines and still look fabulous so that even laptop-owners can join in the fray. The key to this is Stardock's level-of-detail engine that determines how much you can see in any view of the map. The game supports both a third-person, overhead view that looks sort of like Diablo and a massively pulled back view that converts the map to a stylish "cloth map" with your sovereign enlarged to giant size so you can still see him or her. As you zoom in or out, the engine will add or subtract detail. Zoom in from the cloth map and the land suddenly becomes realistic, with clumps of dark green forest and blue lines of rivers. Zoom in farther and you can make out crop lines on farmland and walls around cities. Farther still and you begin to see little stick people farming the land and walking between buildings in towns. And at the closest level, each individual farmer looks distinctly different and even has its own shadow.

In the long term, Wardell looks to the modding community to make Elemental a robust world of fantasy and strategy. He said Stardock learned from Sins of a Solar Empire that sometimes modders have a much better idea for how something should look, or are able to craft an item that changes the dynamics of a conflict in awesome ways. To encourage this kind of creativity, Elemental provides modding tool with the game and an upload system similar to Spore's Sporepedia creature library. Users can upload their player-made tuff as "non-canon" items for other users to download for their own games – and if the developer likes the item enough and it doesn't totally unbalance gameplay, they can promote the items to "canon."

Sadly, I didn't get to see the modding stuff – mostly I spent time ogling the map views and discussing the specifics of the family alliance system. For example, I asked if it were possible to create a potion with the modding tools that will produce only sons in a marriage and Wardell laughed, saying it was possible , but probably non-canon. He did say that you could research potions in the game to make vassal family members more attractive so they'd be easier to marry off – but he wasn't quite sure yet how the succession of children from a vassal marriage would work.

Like, if both parents die, does the oldest child automatically become head of the house, or will it pass to the firstborn son? These are questions that probably only interest me, Wardell and any Song of Ice and Fire fan who thinks Myrcella should get the Iron Throne instead of Tommen (incest notwithstanding). But the answers to those questions will make Elemental a richer strategy game in the long run.

Elemental: War of Magic is due out in early 2010. Here are some screens and concept art:

Phase IV of Impulse rolls out a new service called Ready-to-Play that functions as a sort of Facebook for PC gamers. The client allows you to create a buddy list and interact with said buddies like a messenger. It also allows you to create a profile that broadcasts to other PC gamers with similar interests and gaming styles what you're playing so that you can make more buddies and never not have someone to game with.

The idea, says Stardock President & CEO Brad Wardell explained that the idea behind Ready-to-Play is to streamline the matchmaking process. While the client won't dump you into a lobby, it will create a social network that lowers the risk of entering into a multiplayer match with gamers you don't know who could potentially be griefers or foul-mouthed 13-year-olds.

Other updates to Phase IV include a cosmetic makeover, a new website and the ability to download games and software on the service without actually using the client. Ultimately, Wardell said, Stardock's goal with Impulse was to create a concept of ownership with PC games similar to what you get with console games. Like, you could buy a game on Impulse, and then turn around and sell it on Impulse when you're done with it.

Doesn't sound like they're quite there yet, but between Ready-to-Play and the PC Gamer's Bill of Rights unveiled last year at the Penny Arcade Expo, Stardock is definitely doing more than just trying to keep up with Steam.

You can get your hands on a Ready-to-Play beta code at PAX this September.

The problem that Stardock seemed to be having with releasing a demo for the action real-time strategy title was figuring out how to limit things while still giving players a good idea of what to expect from the title gameplay wise. What they've come up with is a demo with one map, four playable Demigods (Regulus, Rook, Sedna, and Lord Erebus), and all multiplayer modes.

Seems like an elegant solution to me. Allowing the player to experience multiple Demigods is key. The maps don't matter as much from a demo standpoint as letting players know that each Demigod they can pick offers them a completely different set of skills and powers to accomplish your goals in each game mode.

Check out my review from way back when - ignoring the now fixed networking issues - to get an idea of what to expect, or better yet, just head over to FilePlanet and download the damn thing.

Stardock, the publishers behind Sins of a Solar Empire and Demigod, seem to think so. CEO Brad Wardell has told Gamasutra "it would be good if everybody switched to Windows 7 as quickly as possible". And why? Because, as you've probably heard elsewhere, Windows 7 is what Vista should have been, and provides the jump in performance and accessibility its predecessor was lacking.

That's not to say he wants developers to focus only on Windows 7. "One of the things that comes up often is, 'How has Stardock made so much money on these niche games?'" Wardell says. "Well, because our games run on millions of boxes."

So a balance between the two, then. Something scalable if you could, developers. That'd be great, thanks.

Stardock's Wardell: 'Switch To Windows 7 As Quickly As Possible' [Gamasutra]

Now that the vast majority of their networking issues have subsided, Stardock is making good with their promise of discounts on additional copies of Demigod. If you've picked up a copy and registered it, you might want to keep an eye on your email, as the coupons are only good for a limited time.

As a token of our appreciation to our customers who have waited patiently while we've addressed the on-line multiplayer difficulties, we present you with this 50% off coupon on purchasing a second copy of the digital version of Demigod for your friends or family. This will only be valid until early next week so this would be a good time to use it.

Now how much would you pay (duh, half price)? But wait, there's more! Next week Stardock is sending out another round of apology coupons, this time good for 20% off any game available on their Impulse platform, with the promise of more coupons for regular Demigod players in the future.

It's just Stardock's way of saying that they're sorry, and if you stop playing Demigod you'll be missing out on future bargains. It's a devious sort of apology, isn't it?

The early release and subsequent rampant piracy of Gas Powered Games' action real-time strategy title were just the beginning of the networking problems that Demigod has been plagued with since release. Some bad networking decisions and assumptions on Stardock's part caused the issues to drag on for weeks. It seems the way they had things set up initially caused far too many sockets to try to open at once, due to a late 2008 decision to have the network library hand off sockets to the game, rather than have all the connections handled by one source. Wardell's example almost makes it understandable.

...on launch day, Alice would host a game. Tom would be connected to Alice by the network library and then that socket would be handed to Demigod. Then, Alice and Tom would open a new socket to listen for more players to join in. As a result, a user might end up using a half dozen ports and sockets which some routers didn't like and it just made things incredibly complex to connect people and put a lot of strain on the servers to manage all those connections.

So what was happening? When I tried to play, two or three players would connect successfully and then the slow, agonizing wait would kick in. Brad explains why:

Alice hosts a game. In doing so, she sends a message to the NAT server (as well as our servers). Tom wants to join so Tom clicks join and it tells the NAT server to begin connecting them. But, it turned out that a relatively small number of people online at once would quickly result in a huge delay in messages being sent back and forth. For instance, when Tom clicks join it sends a message to the server to tell it to start connecting Tom and Alice. But Alice might not get that message for 30 or 40 seconds. That means, for that entire time, Tom and Alice are "attempting to connect" but haven't even really started because Alice hasn't even gotten the message. As more people tried to join the game, that delay could get worse and worse. If someone left the game, it could take that amount of time for the server to realize that player had left (meanwhile it was trying to connect them).

At this point, the people inside the room waiting for the game to start will have resorted to cannibalism, and most of them weren't even hungry. It's just that frustrating.

Brad goes on to detail the changes that have been made and will be made as they continue to polish the network experience, plans for downloadable content, and an eventual demo, but most importantly, his post leaves us with the important lesson Stardock learned from releasing Demigod.

We've learned that you can't treat networking as just another thing to plug in like you would a sound library or even a 3D engine. It's a whole different animal. With Elemental (our next game), it's single-player focused but its MP will be server based (and I mean we literally host the game). After Demigod, I don't ever want to hear the words "socket" or "port" again.

Demigod: So what the hell happened? [Brad Wardell's Impulse Blog]

Demigod has had less than and healthy start so far, with GameStop selling the game early, piracy running rampant, and of course, tons of networking problems, which can be a real killer for a game with a strong online focus. Wardell, posting as Frogboy on his Stardock Impulse blog, assures us that significant breakthroughs have been made regarding networking issues, and that the connectivity issues some users have been having will be going away this week.

Along with the networking news , Wardell also detailed plans to get more players online and playing the game. He explains that the initial networking problems cause Stardock to halt marketing for the product, and that once the issues are fixed marketing will kick in full swing. He also reveals that a multiplayer demo is in the works, soliciting existing players for ideas on how to best limit a demo while still allowing demo players and retail players to play together.

Finally, in a move that should both pull in new players while satisfying the day-one adopters, every person who has purchased the game from the day it went on sale up until May 10th will receive a coupon good for half off an additional copy. So if one of your friends is looking into buying the game, tell them you'll pick them up a copy and can pay you back, pocketing the difference.

What?

Demigod: Breakthru [Skinning the Frog - Thanks Davis!]

Demigod is an action real-time strategy game with role-playing game elements that obviously takes a great deal of inspiration from the popular Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients. Instead of commanding armies and managing resources, players take on the role of a single demigod, battling against other like-powered beings for a chance at a promotion to full-on godhood. It's a fast-paced answer to the slow and plodding pace featured in many real-time strategy offerings, with a strong focus on online multiplayer.

Does Demigod meet its goal of offering a fresh, new experience to the strategy genre, or is the game suffering from delusions of grandeur?

Loved
Divine Gameplay: Much like the Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients, Demigod is not a real-time strategy game. It's an arena combat game with a real-time strategy feel, role-playing game leveling, and first-person shooter goals. When the game is at its best the balance that Gas Powered Games has achieved between the different elements truly shines through. Depending on the options chosen before battle and the payers involved, games can be quick and dirty or long and drawn out. There is no real resource management and no complicated troop commands to master. Just get in, level your demigod, and get the job done. Simple, elegant, and amazingly addictive.

A Varied Pantheon: While there are only eight different demigod characters to choose from, each has a wide variety of different powers to choose from, meaning that two different players using the same character can wind up playing it in entirely different ways. If another player tells you that a certain character sucks, odds are they just aren't playing them right. A great deal of the strategy in Demigod comes from knowing which powers to level based on the round's goals and your opposition.

A Wealth of Options: With only four game modes and eight maps, Demigod might seem a bit limited at first, but a generous set of match customization options adds a great deal of variety to the title. If the plain vanilla matches are getting old, you can always start off with large amounts of cash, increase the game's pace, or start your demigods off at maximum level to see how things play out across an even playing field.

Heavenly Presentation: Demigod looks and sounds absolutely beautiful. The action plays out fluidly from both a far-off top down perspective or zoomed in close to the action, and the arenas themselves are works of art. The demigods themselves have real character, from their voices and rumblings to their unique behaviors.

Hated
A Supreme Lack of Guidance: There is absolutely no tutorial mode for Demigod, and I mean none. Outside of the odd tip while games are loading, there really isn't anything that tells you how to play included in the game proper. Upon first starting up a single player tournament I expected some sort of hand-holding to ensue, but that simply wasn't the case. As a result, my first round of play ended with me losing horribly. A game that has the capability to be as engrossing as Demigod does could really benefit from some sort of demonstration showing players how much fun it can be once you know what you are doing.

Ungodly Broken Multiplayer: Stardock continues to work on stabilizing multiplayer, but as of this writing it is still pretty much broken, at least where I am concerned. I've never been able to join a quick match or participate in the game's ongoing online Pantheon tournament. My only success at joining an online game has come from joining a custom game, and even then I've had to wait in a lobby chatting while we watched other players fruitlessly trying to connect. Once you get into an actual game it's gobs of fun. Getting there, however, is no picnic.

Demigod has the potential to be a truly great game; it just isn't quite there yet. It's got a unique sort of gameplay that successfully blends aspects of several different genres into a completely compelling, suprisingly deep, and utterly addictive multiplayer experience. Unfortunately the focus here is on multiplayer. With very little offered in the way of a single player game, Gas Powered Games is obviously banking on Demigod's online aspect, and quite frankly that isn't working at the moment.

Once the online connectivity issues are sorted out, Demigod will be a force to be reckoned with. Until then, picking up a copy is akin to paying $39 to participate in a glorified beta test.

Demigod, developed by Gas Powered Games, published by Stardock, released April 14th for the PC. Retails for $40. Completed single player tournament with multiple demigods on normal difficulty, played multiple single player skirmish rounds, and several cutom online multiplayer battles. Was unable to connect for multiplayer Skirmish or Pantheon modes.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

A status report on Stardock's site lets us know that while for an unfortunate few the online-only game is effectively broken, for "most people" things are "working pretty decently". Which isn't a clean bill of health, we know, but it's also good enough for people to at least dip their toes into the game's cold, icy depths.

While it's easy (especially if you actually bought the game) to get angry at Stardock for such a sloppy launch, try and remember that a big reason it was so sloppy in the first place is because the company shipped the game without DRM. Which really is something that should be applauded.

Demigod: Day 6 Status Report! [Stardock]

In a post on the game's forums, Stardock's Brad Wardell has revealed that the game's servers have been flooded with users trying to play the game. More users than they would have anticipated going by sales, as Wardell says internal data shows that while the game has been purchased by 18,000 people, there have been around 120,000 people trying to play the game over the past week.

So, yes, mostly pirated copies. Come on PC gamers. You wonder why companies decide to saddle you with crap like SecuROM, regardless of how ineffective and unpopular it is? It's because of statistics like that.

Update: We contacted Stardock reps to clarify the "legitimate" versus "warez" figures posted by CEO Brad Wardell on the game's official forums, who told Kotaku that concurrent connections from Demigod players do not necessarily equate to sales. According to a statement, the "18,000 figure is the [number] of concurrent users at the peak – not sales."

"[Demigod's] infrastructure was designed to handle up to 50,000 of these connections," said Wardell. "But on day 0, there were around 140,000 concurrent users of which 18,000 are validated. Pirated users can't get updates or play multiplayer but they still touch the servers."

That crush of users, most of them not-legitimate (read: pirated) copies led to what Wardell called a "terrible experience."

Stardock and Demigod developer Gas Powered Games then "[scrapped] together a doppelganger of the infrastructure dedicated to Demigod's multiplayer network needs" and issued an update to legit players, essentially keeping the pirates from crashing the multiplayer party.

Demigod: Day 1 Status Report [Demigod]

GameStop was selling the real-time strategy PC game from Gas Powered Games as early as last Friday, days ahead of the planned April 15th street date. Those wondering why street dates are imposed need look no further than the post on the official Demigod forums, which details a ruined Easter weekend for many Stardock employees.

it was Easter weekend. And many of us had just finished a good solid 8 weeks of massive crunch and were looking forward to the weekend to recover. Instead, we found ourselves back at work having to turn on and configure the multiplayer matchmaking servers (we had enough for a beta but not for thousands of people).

The post also raises concerns that the early release maximizes piracy, as the game was only available through the one retail channel for several days, but Stardock looks on the bright side..."The good news, however, is that we'll get to actually see the effects of piracy". When life gives you lemons...

To help ease players' pains, Stardock released the game on their Impulse early, so the game is now available for purchase online.

Demigod is early [Demigod Forums]

What is Goo? Goo stands for Game Object Obfuscation. What it does is allow game publishers to encapsulate their game's executable file together with Stardock's Impulse Reactor virtual platform in a single encrypted file. When the player starts the game for the first time they enter their email address and serial number and that's it. The game is tied to that person, as opposed to being locked to any one piece of hardware.

How does this help?

For one, it allows players to validate their game on any service that supports that particular title. It also allows players to resell their PC games, as they'll be able to voluntarily deassign the game, allowing someone else to sign up with their email and the serial number. In effect, you actually have a product with real value outside of your computer.

"One of our primary goals for Impulse Reactor is to create a solution that will appeal to game developers while adhering to the Gamers Bill of Rights," said Brad Wardell, president & CEO of Stardock. "Publishers want to be able to sell their games in as many channels as possible but don't want to have to implement a half-dozen ‘copy protection' schemes. Game Object Obfuscation lets the developer have a single game build that can be distributed everywhere while letting gamers potentially be able to re-download their game later from any digital service. Plus, it finally makes possible a way for gamers and publishers to transfer game licenses to players in a secure and reliable fashion."

Stardock will launch Goo on April 7th as part of the phase 3 release of their Impulse digital delivery platform. They expect to announce publishers taking advantage of the Goo technology next month.

It's nice to get a feel for how the game actually plays, after pouring over screenshots for the past year. While the screens have certainly been impressive, they've never quite given me a good idea of how a round plays out. For the most point it looks like your standard real-time strategy game, only confined to arenas rather than spread out over a large playfield, basically capturing the essence of the genre without having to deal with long, drawn out battles.

Demigod finally sees the light of day on April 14th.

Stardock's Impulse is essentially their answer to Steam, featuring games from Atari, THQ, 2k, Capcom, Epic, and more, along with applications and utilities to help make your PC gaming experience run a bit smoother. Now in its 9th month of operation, Impulse is quickly approaching its one millionth user, expecting to be just behind Steam by the time the service reaches its first anniversary.

"By Impulse's first birthday, we expect Impulse to be the 2nd largest digital distributor of PC games and to have nearly all of the major PC game publishers on board," said (Stardock president and CEO Brad)Wardell.

To celebrate, Stardock is giving away a $4,000 gaming PC to the one millionth user, a reward process I never really understood. Sure, it helps drive new people to the service, but what of the nearly one million already signed up? What do they get? Gratitude is nice and all, but it doesn't run Crysis. I checked.

Worried that the $19.95 price point for the PC version of the popular and innovative Xbox Live Arcade title Braid would keep PC gamers from purchasing the title upon it's release next month, Blow quickly leapt into action, explaining that attracting new players was more important than money at this point.

I don't care that much about the PC release price. The XBLA version was nicely profitable, and my goal with the PC release is mainly to get the game out to a wider audience. Sure, it would be nice to earn the optimal amount of money from that release - I have interesting ideas for games that I want to make in the future, and making games is very expensive, and I will probably have to hire people to help! But ultimately, I would rather have people talking about the game itself, what they like and dislike about it, than about how many American Fiat Currency Dollars it costs.

While I believe Braid is worth every penny of the original price, I suppose it's nice of Blow to give PC gamers a little break. Perhaps they'll pay him back in kind by buying the game in enormous quantities.

Meanwhile, Stardock has announced that they will be honoring the lowered price point, with anyone who preordered the game at $19.95 only being charged the reduced $14.95 price. Good for them!

Braid for the PC is now $15. [Braid]

I still maintain a fair amount of excitement for Demigod, and these screenshots once again punctuate the reason why - scale. The sheer size of the creatures tromping through the unique battlegrounds of the game is still extremely impressive. While I've yet to actually get any hands-on time with the title, at least I know that if it winds up horrible it will still look good running on my monitor while I am off doing more interesting things.

The company is also looking at other properties - Master of Orion has been mentioned, as have Bioware-style isometric RPGs such as Baldur's Gate or Planescape Torment.

"I think there are a lot of people who want that. They want to have a party again. They want to have a Minsc-type character in there," Stardock's Brad Wardell told Gamasutra, "Someone's going to have to do it. If it's not another studio, it's got to be Stardock."

Stardock CEO Wardell Eyes Star Control, Orion, And More [Gamasutra]

But no! They seem to be really going for it! Stardock has just issued an interim revision to the Bill, with changes based on feedback and the "amazing level of support from the publisher and developer community".

Much of the feedback concerned publisher's use of DRM and who exactly 'owns' the game once it has been purchased.

Some of the changes may raise eyebrows - "Gamers shall have the right to not be treated as potential criminals by developers or publishers." becomes "Gamers whose computers meet the posted minimum requirements shall have the right to use their games without being materially inconvenienced due to copy protection or digital rights management." which is more focused, perhaps, but also a lot less dramatic.

The Revised Gamer's Bill Of Rights (interim)

1. Gamers shall have the right to return games that are incompatible or do not function at a reasonable level of performance for a full refund within a reasonable amount of time.
2. Gamers shall have the right that games they purchase shall function as designed without defects that would materially affect the player experience.
3. Gamers shall have the right that games will receive updates that address minor defects as well as improves gameplay based on player feed back within reason.
4. Gamers shall have the right to have their games not require a third - party download manager installed in order for the game to function.
5. Gamers shall have the right to have their games perform adequately if their hardware meets the poste d recommended requirements.
6. Gamers shall have the right not to have any of their games install hidden drivers.
7. Gamers shall have the right to re - download the latest version of the games they purchase.
8. Gamers whose computers meet the posted minimum requirements shall have the right to use their games without being materially inconvenienced due to copy protection or digital rights management.
9. Gamers shall have the right to play single player games without having to have an Internet connection.
10. Gamers shall have the right to sell or transfer the ownership of a physical copy of a game they own to another person.

Stardock Rates DRM Complaints, Revises Gamers Bill of Rights [Shacknews]