Just registered to add my humble opinion about Stardock/Steam idea.

I am a Steam user first of all. Though when it was first released, i was one of the most passionate Steam haters available those days . Years passed and we have a much more refined Steam, so much infact i began to LOVE Steam. It's silly to actually love a piece of software i know, but i think it deserves it.

Biggest advantage of Steam is, there are lots of games available in it. Recently i started to repurchase some of my already retail owned games from Steam. Sometimes just for the sake of having it on steam, sometimes because i lost/scratched the disc. But mostly in all circumstances, i was a happy customer.

Still there are lots of people that have problems with Steam, but when you look at the big picture (15 million people using it), you'll see that people that are having problems are a very small percentage of all Steam users. Some people will always have problems with a specific software, if the product is still supported (Steam obviously is) usually these problems gets fixed after some time. Also, dont forget most of the problems are caused by the DEVELOPERS themselves, not by Steam, and it is developers responsibility to fix them.

Better or worse, there are lots of games available at steam. Valve's products are best in my opinion. Some people says Orange Box is not a fair deal as most people agrees. Perhaps from their own point of view it isnt. For the fans of FPS genre, i think there is no better deal currently available. If you dont care much about the genre itself however, its your own perspective. I for one choose quality over quantity, hence why i am so careful about picking my games.

I've been hearing about Gal Civ and more recently Sins for years, but never had the opportunity to try it out properly. With the recent release of Sins i was honestly waiting for Steam release to pick it up. I've been wondering why they havent made their products available from Steam for sometime. Until i started to actually search for the means to buy Sins digitally, i never ever heard about SDC or anything close to it. Though i'm sure people NEVER had any problems with it (not the software bugs but the reliability and trust as a distribution platform) but i'm still concerned about it. Mainly because i have so much games on Steam now, i really dont want a seperate software for Stardocks game.

Most of the people said Stardock doesnt use Steam because steam includes DRM. Yes its true Steam does use DRM for its games but as far as i know, only if developers wants to use it. Developers use it because most of them are paranoid about copy protection and piracy anyway (including independent developers which can go ridiculouslypainful lengths of anti-piracy techniques). Valve also released Steamworks which further allows Steam integration of the game to Steam, but it isnt mandatory in any way. Its all up to developer/publisher for what and what not to include as Steam release. If Stardock doesnt want to use DRM of Steam, they dont want to, they can just release it with a steam overlay IF the game is being run by the Steam. If not, than in can just as normally as it runs from SDC.

I think all people know the real reason why Stardock doesnt want to release their game to Steam. Stardock considers themselves as a direct competitor of Steam. I am OK with that, infact i really respect and admire that. I think the people that are quick to bash Valve or Steam should also have at least some objective thought before considering it "rubbish".

As for the buying games from Stardock Central (or impulse if its released already), i made my mind while writing this post. I will be unhappy at first, but who knows if i like it i may migrate to SDC permanently someday .

Note: Sorry for the big wall of text and the errors i made in it. I'm not a native english of speaker  

Sorry for the 3rd post but, i had to add.

Using a CD-Key is also one of the oldest Copy Protection methods. It is RM without a D and personally causes more inconvenience (losing it for example) than say, Steam . I'll see how Stardock implement it soon enough though.

(pardon the double post but the edit button vanished again)

The way Stardock does it, they only ask for the key if you want to play MP online using ICO Otherwise you;re free to play the game SP or MP over LAN without having to touch the cd-key at all. It's hard to make it any easier than that without leaving off the cd-key entirely.

Steam handles registration of retail copies of Valve games with CD-keys. And in that case such registration is mandatory. Last I saw (HL2), if you didn't have internet you couldn't play retail copies of Valve games or even install them, period (even single-player-only games).

With our games, you can get a retail copy and never so much as set your mouse on our site or SDC/Impulse. It's only needed if you want to get updates. Which is obviously going to need internet anyway.

It's also worth noting that to sell things on Steam you'd need to give Valve a pretty significant cut. So not only does going our own way give us more freedom and the ability to make things better, but it also means nobody else is taking a piece of our pie

I was talking about more general use of CD-Keys, not just Stardocks. Also noticed i said RM, aka Rights Management. I didnt said anything about copy protection. Still, a CD-Key or a program that you have to run is still "DRM" in my eyes no matter how its presented.

I dont consider subtle DRM's a bad thing so it is ok with me, but honestly, it is still some kind of "protection", otherwise we wouldnt need any CD-Keys in the first place. Setup would have created and submitted a random CD-Key if you really needed to track sale/install numbers and you would just upload the patches into any patch hosting site so you dont even need extra bandwidth.

If Stardock REALLY hated the copy protection and DRM, they wouldnt even used a software like SDC or a CD-Key system in the first place. Make no mistake, as subtle this is, it is still a kind of RM.



Thats more valid arguament than "Stardock hates DRM" honestly. I didnt knew about SDC but now that i know about it, i understand the reason behind you decision

I don't think that's fair to say. My understanding is that Steam is pretty generous to developers and publishers.

Not to disagee with my own teammates but I do like Steam.  I just think Impulse is going to be substantially better. It'll have basically the same games, more features, and support non-games, mini expansions, more multiplayer options, etc.

Impulse is very good for Steam as it will keep Valve updating and improving Steam (just as they would have otherwise but also with more ideas exchanged).

I uninstalled Steam eleven months ago :

its main-program update-process crashed my (otherwise flawless) PC in a very nasty fashion. And they (Valve/Steam) then had no tech support whatsoever : none!

I have never experienced the least problem with StarDockCentral.

I do not know what "Impulse" is, even though I see it mentioned on this forum.

Will SDC disappear when that mysterious Impulse gets launched?

Give one recent example of this?

I dont like the steam idea. Some one siad it was handy when you got a new computer you just install steam and the n dowload the games. Which sounds great except the steam servers a craptaculery slow, so slow that it would be way faster to just instal the game of the CD. As for buying games Steam is just like 99.9% of distributors and publishers, their nazis for the copy protection, regonal lockouts and price gouging. The community part is nice thou. But I would still like to have the CD in my hands so when it gets lost i can only blam my self, unlike is a server crashed and they lost it.