Impulse could be a great entrant to the market - I love Steam, but it's really the only player in the town and could use some competition. EA's store and Direct2Drive don't really count, in my mind, as they're singularly focused on content delivery and leave out the critical pieces of matchmaking, etc.

Piqued.

The thing that interests me most about Impulse is the way that it completely obviates copy protection. The model Wardell is hoping for is more pay-as-you-go than monolithic release. Small enough updates with low enough prices will provide more than enough motivation for people actually interested in a game to have a legit copy. It'll be the only way to keep getting latest and greatest via Impulse.

Elaborate please - I'm interested in Impulse from the whole "competition" perspective but am wondering what you mean by FUBAR pricing. Intentionally more expensive than the 45$ from the sins site?

I understand the desire to save 10 bucks, but when you buy from big-box instead of from a website for a small developer like Ironclad, you have a huge impact on their bottom line. We're talking the difference between 5 dollars and 50) maybe not quite that much, but not way off. If you're not in a position to view your game dollar as a charitable contribution, I ain't gonna hold it against you. But there's really no way they can get big box distribution at ALL if they sell it for less, themselves, on line.

I actually e-mailed Stardock to try to get them to drop the price of GalCiv II Gold (which was around 10 bucks more than Amazon). The response:

I don't get this at all. Do they sign agreements to hold the price at a certain point or something? This was well after the point I could even buy the game from a retail store.

I'm not asking them to sell it for less than the big box stores. I'm asking them to not be THE single most expensive source for the game. There's a difference between the two.

I fully appreciate the fact that they can't undercut retail and still get the box on shelves. But retail has left them in the dust. The game is now a $30-40 game, everywhere except from Stardock themselves. Is it so much to ask for them to be in the same ballpark? I'd be more than happy to break a tie, or even a "close enough" tie in their favor. But not budging from the original price?

Okay, but for whatever reason, Wardell decided that the only package he was going to offer via Stardock/TotalGaming is the collector's edition. He said as much in this message.

It's not a case of Stardock trying to gouge people, or them not keeping up with the current price at retail, they've decided they'll only sell the collector's edition. For which I think they are rightly charging a premium.

I think this is a unique case, different from the general pricing you see on Stardock/TotalGaming/Impulse. Obviously a publisher can't match every retail price in existence, because the loss leaders would eat their lunch. Stardock does set very reasonable prices for things, though: Imperium Romanum for $40, Sword of the Stars for $20, Earth 2150 Trilogy for $10...

BTW, the current Amazon price for the retail Sins is $40, for the CE is $48. Amazon prices change all the time... it wouldn't surprise me if they have different prices based on the time of day, like the way airlines price tickets!

I don't understand how this is true. A digital download is essentially no cost to them - I give them money and they transfer some bits to me. I suppose if a store sold a game at less than what Stardock charges the retail distribution chain - unlikely - Stardock might make less money, but they can't really lose money.

Why not? The time to check out a few major retailers is minimal. I realize they have no need to clear shelf space, but selling a digital download is pretty much pure profit. Better something than nothing, right?

Digital distribution has a non-zero cost. To be sure, the costs are different from physical distribution, printing, duplication, packaging, shipping, distributor costs, retailer slotting fees, but they exist, nonetheless. It ain't cheap to run a redundantly-peered high volume data center capable of handling huge peak downloads the size of a modern game installer. There are also support costs associated with digital distribution that don't even enter into the physical retail chain.

I'm not saying the costs are the same, but digital delivery definitely isn't free.

Digital distributors can also afford to give bigger cuts to publishers, essentially passing on their cost savings as bottom-line profit. Because they cut different deals with publishers, their margins probably aren't as fat as you might assume.

If I had to guess, I'd say that Stardock had to cut some pretty painful deals with big box retailers to get their game on the shelves. In Europe, no distributor would agree to carry their game! Nobody believed that a space strategy game would make any money. It wouldn't surprise me at all if a "no digital retail package" or "guaranteed minimum digital price" were requirements Stardock had to meet.

This was a very risky game coming out the gate. A developer's first title, trying to define a new genre, released both on and offline with no copy protection? I can still hear the echos of the laughter of the suits...

One thing I definitely agree with you on: this kind of fixed pricing is anti-consumer. In order for Impulse to succeed, especially with its stated goal of extending the lifetime of games, it's going to have to follow the market pretty closely.

I have to say that i'm with Legion on this. I don't hate digital distribution but the pricing really needs to be worked out.

Not to mention that having variable pricing from country to country makes even less sense when it's a single player game or player-hosted multiplayer. (i'm talking about price before tax just in case anyone gets the wrong end of the stick)

Steam do this a lot - as well as occasionally not making things available to their loyal European users.

It's not uncommon for distribution agreements to include protection clauses for the retailers. At one time, it was sort of an 'honor system' that you didn't undercut your retailers, but I believe that's actually become part of the distribution contracts, much of the time.

Valve is in an unusually powerful position in the industry, and Gabe Newell plays serious hardball, so Steam may not be limited in the same way.

In thinking about it, I believe Valve is the only digital distributor that isn't full retail price, all the time... well, other than Gametap's buffet model.

Running a high-volume data center is not a fixed one-time cost. I get tired of hearing the argument that downloads are free. Speedy, reliable downloads are not free.

Exactly. How much does supporting a purchaser of downloadable content cost?

Take my original example. I don't own GalCiv 2, so I decide to change that by purchasing it from Stardock. I input my credit card. I get an e-mail with a link to let me download the game. I download the game ( which is around 1-2 gigs, I think). The cost to them was an automatic e-mail and some bandwidth.

Compare that to printing a disc, a box, a manual, shipping to store (or maybe a distributor first) which then takes a sizeable piece of the pie before putting it onto a store shelf. Even assuming a developer can magic new copies directly onto the shelves at Target, the $10-15 markup Target wants has to be enormous relative to the cost of me downloading it.

If the retail markup is on par with the cost of supporting digital downloads, that would imply that a game selling a million copies requires $10-15 million to support digital distribution, something I find hard to believe.