Stardock President and CEO Brad Wardell revealed in his blog earlier this week just what the plans are for the company's digital distribution service (DDS) Impulse, and also their philosophies for the new digital rights management (DRM) system lovingly titled "Goo" (Game Object Obfuscation).
Taking the retrospective route, we're brought through the history of Impulse, and left with the impression the newly launched Phase 3 is the first "real" iteration of the service, now that the good majority of bugs and kinks and "first generation junk" have been worked out. As a result, they've made it easier for developers to get in contact with them, so more should be on board soon (Activision already is). Come June, Phase 4, Impulse 2.0 will arrive, with a host of changes and features in the 2.x series to complement it, the best of which they cannot yet reveal.
So that's all well and good. The meat here, though, is in the details on Goo and its counterpart Impulse Reactor, which Wardell seems excited to get into (a warmly-welcomed change from some of last year's sentiments). Of particular note is how the protection requires no change to the source codeof a game, a requirement of other DRM methods like SecuROM anyone should care about, as this can affect performance and operability.
Explaining the philosophies behind Goo and the upcoming Impulse Marketplace (where you'll be able to sell your games), Wardell knows "giving your customers more flexibility is more profitable than trying to lock them in"; the explanation is something we can't help but chuckle at:
Before I get into this, let me respond to some people who say that the idea of letting people sell their digitally distributed games to other people is pie in the sky and economic suicide. People said the same thing when we started releasing our games without any CD copy protection and yet our sales on our software have continued to grow.
Let’s be honest, 5 years ago, almost nobody had heard of Stardock except maybe former OS/2 users. So what changed? Our software has begun selling so well that people have become familiar with some program we make. Why is that? Because being consumer friendly is profitable: If you reduce the risk of purchasing your product you will get more sales.
When we began releasing programs with no copy protection on the CD, the only question was: Would we gain more sales from this policy than we would lose due to piracy. The answer, I think is pretty clear now, is yes. We gained a lot of sales.
Similarly, consider this: If you can buy something that you know you can sell back later, does it increase the odds you’ll buy it? Even if it doesn’t, it certainly doesn’t decrease it.
Stardock isn’t consumer friendly because we’re a bunch of naive hippies or something. Stardock is consumer friendly because we’re a bunch of greedy capitalists who have recognized what should be an obvious truth: If you treat people as potential customers and not potential criminals you are likely to get more sales.
Amen, Frogboy.
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