Has anyone published (or distributed, or etc.) a game through http://www.impulsedriven.com/? (I guess the “in” thing these days is to name your distribution company after a source of motive power?).
They seem a little more open about the policies and procedures than Steam does (though perhaps they are less prestigious?). Anyone with personal experience?
Personally I’ve never heard of them before. But the site looks good.
Don’t have any personal experience, but yes, I think they are less prestigious at the moment. Stardock is no Valve, and their releases, while great games, don’t have anything like the mass market appeal of Valve’s games. I suspect this translates directly to people’s awareness and/or perception of their respective distribution platforms, too.
That said, I don’t think either one demands exclusivity, as the rule for most major indie releases seems to be that if it appears on one distribution platform (Steam, Impulse, Direct2Drive, GamersGate, etc.), it appears on almost all of them.
I have no experience but I am actively looking into publishing methods at the moment. So I hope someone with experience will post here.
I believe Impulse is the biggest distributor of download games after steam. I can remember reading that steam has 70% of the market and Impulse 10% but I can’t verify those numbers.
They do seem more open then steam. They state their base royalty rate is 70% which sounds great to me.
Impulse also seems more “Unity friendly” to me-- their approach seems to be encrypting .exe’s and keying them to serial codes (which I think the developer supplies?). What that means is that there’s no additional development involved (whereas in Steam for all I know you may need to demonstrate a certain level of “compatibility” with the Steam interface-- overlays and such-- before you are released).
I know that two or three Unity games have made it onto Steam but because Valve is so tight-lipped about the process, it’s difficult to say what extra development is necessary (while in the FAQ they assure you that it is minimal, that ‘minimal’ may be based on the assumption that you are programming something like C# in visual studio or the like, where hooking into some DLL’s may be less cumbersome than it is for the typical Unity developer, who may not have a C background). (Sorry about how long that parenthetical phrase is).
I would also guess that impulse takes less of a royalty. The fact that Steam’s terms are NDA’d, to me, indicates that either the rates aren’t great and they want people to have a foot in the door before they find out, or that the rates vary by product (probably charging less of a royalty for the top-grade, AAA titles, since they cost and move more).
I’ve only experience with them as customer yet and from that end I like it.
They are not as cluttered as Steam and especially don’t ripp off european customers (EU but especially non EU european customers).
What they don’t have as far as I’ve seen is a search function thats a bit annoying but it didn’t prevent me from basically switching my digital games to impulse whenever possible
Have any developers here managed to get in touch with Impulse and get a reply to any questions?
Well, with Impulse, I haven’t seen anything that requires you to plug in C++ code, but with Steam, I have(STEAMWORKS, Google it). That might be something to think about with Unity Indie.
we have been in touch with both – steam and impulse – and are currently ironing out deals or waiting for word. I am not willing to share my experiences publicly but if anyone wants to hear about it, hit me up via private message.
I’ve distributed through Impulse. They’re great- very responsive and very easy to deal with, and their deal is public and easy to understand.
Hopefully that will hold in the future too now that GameStop bought it