I remember hearing something about a 1 million accounts.

I'm not too worried about Impulse going out of business.  Stardock has no reason to stop.  What I am worried about is Valve muscling games away from Impulse, such as Civ V.

I hope Brad knows some good anti-trust lawyers, I hope not, but I got a bad feeling he may need them in a few years.

Seems Brad was right when he said that in a few years, digital sales will overtake retail (for PC games).

I created one of those accounts that recently got created

Also can't wait for their christmas sale. Got a list of stuff to buy!

Steam still have plenty of competition and antitrust lawsuits against private company in todays legal enviroment would be pretty hard - unless that company break laws, you have no way to sue them - being successfull isnt a crime.

I wouldnt mind Steam so much I they didnt have these exclusive games like Empire Total War and CIV V. Steam is getting far too much power in my opinion. I use Gamersgate and Impulse for now, but I might be forced into Steam if lots of games will be Steam only.

err... unless you're violating antitrust laws, then being successful is a crime.  Also, any major lawsuit in todays legal environment is pretty hard for either side.  Pretty much a moot point.

You should read those laws - having huge marketshare ISNT illegal (at least in EU and USA).

Show me any recent (succesfull if possible) antitrust lawsuit which was  based only on fact that company XY have very large marketshare.

I think the arguement could be made that Steamworks DRM  requiring the Steam store is anti-competitive.  This would likely have more success in Europe.

IMO:

I dont think so. Decision to use either Steamworks or other solution is made by publisher/developer and games without it can be sold via Steam (so decision not to use Steamworks doesnt cause any damage to developer - which means he isnt forced to use it in order to have his game sold by dominant retailer - Steam) - so if decision to use this technology isnt based on decision by Valve, but on decision by 3rd party, it would be impossible to prove that anything related to Steamworks is anticompetitive.

As it's been mentioned already, Steam being popular is not a problem. Games being exclusive to Steam are.

What state is Impulse::Reactor currently in, both in terms of functionality and overall "interest" from third parties? It would be a shame if what seems to be the only viable alternative to Steamworks ended up being completely ignored.

IMO its not exclusive if D2D also sell Steamworks games.

I would also like to know current status of Impulse Reactor - last time I heard it was supposed to be released together with E:WoM, but I never saw any press release , nothing in news on sites which cover such things etc.

The only downside to Steamworks DRM is having to install it you don't already have it.

If you do have it, exclusivity and DRM mean very little.

I have no problem with Steam only games. Some games wouldn't even be on the market right now if Steam weren't still making them available. Including some titles that released only a year or two ago.

Then again, I'm not on this board as an avid defender/promoter of Impulse.

It already has in terms of total sales. Or not, depending on what you want to measure and how credible you think the numbers are.

Possibly in Europe, because the EU is fond of heavy government regulators that have a hate on for US companies. But not because it's anti-competitive.

The fact of the matter is that Steamworks was a response to a need from developers. A lot of companies want to add similar functionality to their games (achievements, cloud storage, etc). The existing tool sets to do that were some combination of expensive and/or terrible. Steamworks is good at what it does for a price that developers like.

Valve doesn't require Steamworks usage to sell games on Steam, so this is entirely a non-issue. If other companies are unhappy with Steamworks, they should get together and come up with an alternative.

Well.....yes and no. Activation of a product through Steam is one thing...but many games require an active connect through Steam to enjoy many of their features. Some games cannot be played in offline mode. And even if you're going to play off line, you have to launch Steam to play many titles, just so you can tell it go offline. 

Lots of games have just decided it's easier to use Steam as DRM than pay to develop or maintain their own. It IS DRM...but it's DRM with perks.

The exclusivity complaint though....I really don't get that. That sounds more like whiny brand loyalty than a valid complaint. If Impulse had the numbers or the $$ to negotiate for those releases, they would have them. Complaining because Valve is more successful than Impulse and therefore you have to use their service to play X game....yeah. That sounds incredibly whiny. Calling it anti-trust sounds even more whiny.

IMO, I think it's more of a question about the Steam DRM than a Steam vs. Impulse issue.  I only own 1 Steam-based game (Dawn of War II).  I bought the boxed retail version and would have much preferred a version of the game that was not integrated into Steam.  I only play single-player and could care less about achievements or other Steam "services."  However, I still have to deal with Steam, even in off-line mode.  God forbid if I ever wanted to sell the game or just give it away to a friend, something that Steam doesn't allow.  So, my personal issue with Steam has nothing to do with its popularity, marketshare, etc.  I'm glad that Valve has this distribution method and that so many people seem to like it.  However, I guess I'm just somewhat old-school in my beliefs that a consumer deserves to be able to enjoy a product--or resell or give it away--without having to periodically seek the approval (or "authentication") of the distributor.  But I digress. 

If there is litigation, I would imagine that it would be in the wake of Steam's collapse, merger, bankruptcy, etc,, when customers actually read the Steam EULA and find out that there was no backup plan to "unlock" Steam-powered games.  In that event, customers could possibly lose access to their games with no recourse but to file a court claim.  There are many people who own hundreds or even thousands of dollars of Steam games in various parts of the world, so lawsuits are virtually guaranteed.  And like any business would do when facing bankruptcy, failure, or costly litigation, Valve will act in the best interests of shareholders, creditors, and the bottom line, not in the interests of customers.

But the situatiion will get to where everyone will just want that Steamworks solution, not alternatives. The industry is very standards-reliant.  Sucks to have to get an steam emulator to run all my steamworks only games.

The problem with Steamworks is that it requires the running of the Steam Store Client in order to authenticate.  It doesn't make games exclusive to Steam, albeit this is happening due to publishing deals, it makes it unreasonable for other Digitial Services to sell them.

If you buy a Steamworks titles from Direct2Drive and run it, it will launch the Steam Client and you'll be required to create a Steam Account.  Then, you'll be presented with the Steam Store directly on your Desktop before being able to run your game.  Direct 2 Drive has essentially sent it's customer to Valve for their game, and Valve now have the avenue to sell their services to Direct 2 Drive's customers.  Direct 2 Drive is now nothing more than a funnel to Valve; a Steam Re-Seller.
The question arises then, what point does Direct 2 Drive serve?  By not just by-pass the illogical time wasting step of having a Direct 2 Drive client and account, and simply buy the game from Steam instead and save yourself the additional, un-needed hassle.
It has been explained to me that Valve have circumvented anti-competitive legislation by allowing others to make a profit off of their sales.  If you buy the game from Direct 2 Drive, Direct 2 Drive make the profit, not Valve.  However, Valve now place their Steam Store in between you and you're game, and are using their 30,000,000 Users as muscle to offer incredible savings to persuade users to buy from Steam.  They're killing the repeat customer market of Direct 2 Drive.  It's unethical business practices however entirely legal.

My issue comes when Steam and Valve have enough force to say "Hey there Mr. Developer, Steam is our platform and if you want access to our customer base then you need to use Steamworks.  No Steamworks, no go".  When this happens - and it will happen - the PC is now a closed platform, with Valve at the head.  ALl new PCs will need to come with two pre-loaded items: a version of Windows and a copy of Steam.  I'm not prepared to accept this.

Like I mentioned before, Steam becomes a required windows service that has to be running for windows to function.  Your windows admin name becomes your steam id. Windows updates notifies you of Steam game sales. That'd be the next step for Steam.

No, that's the point at which their competitors, who have no such draconian restrictions, get increased business. It's when publishers decide it's time to invest in their own digital distribution platforms for their titles (why they have yet to do this already is beyond me.) It's when MS goes "ahem."

All Steam represents right now is very polished, highly popular digital distribution platform. There is no proprietary technology that makes Steam indispensable to either gamers, publishers or developers. It's simply convenient, for everyone. Valve knows that. They're milking what works with Steam as far as they can. But I seriously doubt they'll ever try anything like that; they know their position is feasible as long as it's popular. The moment they start doing stuff like that, ALL the other platforms start looking much more appealing, to everyone.

And that's before the first anti-trust suit every gets filed. I think you're way off in conspiracy land there. MS can do that because they write the OS that 80% of the world's computers use. You're giving Valve entirely too much credit.

They may rely on popularity and they dont have any specific propietary technologies that anyone else could have, but they are the most streamlined ones.  Apparently other competitors haven't yet placed all the infrastructure, the backend and frontend of the digital distribution service as neat and tidy like Valve has with Steam.  Apparently it's too expensive for most companies, or they just dont want to do it.

None of that would fly for an anti-trust complaint. People don't like how Steam does X, and that's fine. But it's not lawsuit material, and it's certainly not something where the government is going to step in.

That only happened because Microsoft used one monopoly to try and build other monopolies. Valve doesn't actually HAVE the first monopoly and isn't doing anything except providing the best toolset on the market.

Steam's growth has been impressive.

I am surprised no one has pointed out that Steam claimed to have over 20 million active accounts last year (which I believe) and yet states they had an over 100% growth in active users in the past year which, strictly speaking, is impossible (20 million to 30 million is far less than a 100% growth).

Steam has definitely taken off.  Impulse too has done well. Its revenue has gone up over 100% in the past year and it has over 3 million accounts. It's a lot smaller than Steam but while it would be great to make billions, one sometimes must be satisfied with only making millions. 

I predict that Steam and Impulse will see much bigger gains in 2011 though than they did in 2010.

And that is what the lawsuit would be asking for as a remedy- for those games to not mandate the Steam store or maybe even Steam DRM.

I have real fears that the growth of Steam will be followed by Valve pressuring the big publisherrs into working for them exclusively, which would seriously hurt Impulse's growth.

178% increase is tempo of growth in numbers of new accounts (number of their active accounts grew by 5 million in just over 8 months - at the end of january 2010 they reached 25 million).

200+% sales growth is also very nice (no doubt thank to Steam Summer Sale)

Congrats to very nice performance by Impulse! Any new info about Impulse: Reactor? Is it already availible for developers?