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Brad Wardell did an interview with GFW Radio, a podcast by Games for Windows Magazine (which interestingly enough closed down shortly after that recording, Brad denies all responsibily 
) which we discussed on this week's ModCast. To ease discussion on ModCast I made an extract of most of what Brad said, which I reckon those who prefer the written medium over the audio one may prefer, so I'll post it here as well. Mind that that this is a paraphrasing of the interview, not a transcript. If you want to hear these things from the horse's mouth, download the GFW podcast...
Note: this interview was recorded 3 weeks ago, some of the info may be slightly obsolete at this point.
- Is PC Gaming dead?
Brad: no, it's evolving. The old model of a multi-million-dollar advance, long development cycle, buggy release, patch, expansion pack then move on doesn't work anymore. Games have become too expensive and are aimed at very high-end hardware systems that most users don't have. Sales numbers aren't falling, but expectations (and the # of sales needed to break even) have risen.
Sins of a Solar Empire made millions of dollars in the first few days after release, 4 or 5 times more than it cost to make, Stardock consider it a big success. But by the standards of major publishers like EA or Atari (the latter of whom Stardock unsuccessfully negotiated with to publish games like a MoM sequel or Star Control IV) the actual number of sales isn't nearly sufficient, they don't care about anything that will sell less than a million copies. Major game publishers are now (unlike in the 80s and 90s) publically-traded companies and are as such too strongly focused on maximizing gross revenue, not net profit.
Games like WoW and the Sims are anomalies, not the norm, says Brad. If you develop a game you can't expect that's how well it will do. Focus on making a profit, not maximizing revenue.
- Sales: digital distribution & Walmart
Sins of a Solar Empire sold roughly as many copies through digital distribution as at retail but digital distribution is twice as profitable because there's no middle man [by comparison, GalCiv2 sold far more at retail than through digital distribution but still made more money from the latter, red]. It's also very popular at Walmart, but since NPD doesn't count either Walmart sales or digital distribution SoSE won't show up on the NPD top-selling games list. If those two channels were counted SoSE would probably be the top-selling game right now. GalCiv2 also did really well at Walmart, Brad doesn't know why his products are so popular there.
- Sins of a Solar Empire
SoSE is doing much better than GalCiv2 in sales, which gives Brad as the GC2 designer mixed feelings. The expectation was that SoSE would do about as well as GalCiv2, as it was a new game from a new developer (Ironclad Games) and it came out in the busy holiday season where there's little press coverage and very strong competition. But in reality it's so far selling at a rate that's 1.6 or 1.7 times better than GalCiv2 did. Overall GalCiv2 sold around 300,000 copies, SoSE is at 200,000 copies in the first 45 days.
When Stardock decided to become a game publisher they wanted to do things differently than traditional publishers, they wanted to integrate the Stardock and Ironclad teams so Stardock would be part of the development process and Ironclad would be part of the marketing process and they could both fill holes where needed. This was discussed for a long time and Ironclad was very open to this idea.
The empire tree in SoSE was a very revolutionary concept that Brad thought was genius. It seemed scary at first in screenshots but works brilliant when playing the game. Brad talked about how he could steal this idea without anyone noticing until he realised he was saying that on a podcast and this was being reported
- Political Machine 2008
Political Machine is a strategy game about the US elections that's a follow-up of a 2004 version. This version is far, far better though, according to Brad. The engine used is a brand-new 3D engine taken from the yet-unannounced fantasy strategy game Stardock is also working on. It has a fully customisable character creation tool, so you can completely design your own character and control how large their head is, what clothes they're wearing, etc -- it's almost Spore-like in how much design freedom you have. Or you can play with Obama, Clinton, McCain, etc.
- GalCiv2: Twilight of the Arnor
GalCiv2 has a similar custom race design feature, and in Twilight of the Arnor that will be taken to the next level: in TotA every race has its own completely unique tech tree, which means in the custom race designer you can create your own custom tech tree as well. The whole unique tech tree was a "really dumb" idea though: it was waaay more work than Brad realised. Everything ties into the tech tree, so not only did Stardock have to design like 7 completely unique trees, they also had to design hundreds of new improvements, ships, etc to go along with it.
TotA is the end of the road for GalCiv2, the last expansion. So Stardock is throwing everything including the kitchen sink at it, which is not in any way cost-effective but Brad is willing to suck that up. It'll have something like 7 different editors so you can make your own future expansions if you like: they will be very polished so you can go nuts with it, they'll allow you to design your own races, your own units, etc.
- GalCiv3 and future projects
The biggest things still on the wishlist that won't make it into TotA are multiplayer, tactical battles and even better AI. These things will be in a GalCiv3 if Stardock ever makes one, but it'll be years and years before they get around to that. Before then they still have Political Machine to finish, as well as their unannounced fantasy strategy game, their MMO RTS Society and they'll be publishing other games by other developers. Tomorrow Stardock will be announcing another major new game they're going to be publishing, which is scheduled for a release next February [update: this turned out to be Demigod]. The February after that (so in 2010) they hope to be releasing their own fantasy strategy game. Only when all that is done they may do a GalCiv3.
So far all of Stardock's releases have been strategy games but that doesn't mean they're a strategy-only publisher. Brad also really wants to do an RPG some day, he really wants to see another Baldur's Gate or PlaneScape Torment, he feels nobody's making those kind of games anymore (he's not played the Witcher yet though).
- Fantasy strategy game
The yet-unannounced fantasy strategy game (which will have an extended beta program) will be sort of Master of Magic-like (i.e. a turn-based tactical-combat game with multiplayer), in which you can design your own units, you have all sorts of cool spells and it has a very cool zoom feature: if you zoom all the way out the map will become a cloth map a la LotR, but if you're all zoomed in it's very detailed and you can see individual leaves on trees. Players can submit their own content and release that through an in-game feature so you don't have to downloads mods from the web, a little bit like Spore (although Stardock has been working on it for a long, long time). The game will be turn-based because Brad likes games where you (as a player) don't feel rushed.
This game will not a MoM clone however, as Stardock will be adding a lot of new game mechanics and technology has come a long way. For example, it will have a 3D engine and when you start the game you start in a world that has been totally devastated and you have to decide whether you'll be good or evil. If you choose to be good your character comes back to life and you can see plants and trees growing as you progress through the game and it's really pretty. But if you're evil it looks like Mordor and the world will become very nasty and scary. This kind of texture mapping on a 3D surface just wasn't technologically possible when MoM came out.
- Brad's responsibilities
Brad is an AI programmer. When asked if he's considered to quit doing that and just run the business side of things, if he could afford doing that at this point, he says he doubts it. AI programming is very tricky and it takes a lot of experience to get it right, plus he just loves doing it, he doesn't want to quit.
- Game testing
When asked how Stardock tests some of the immense changes they introduce in TotA and the like, Brad says that's Stardock's dirty little secret: their beta program. They just let their users (who preordered the games) test everything. It takes longer to publish the game that way but they get a lot of feedback this way and maintain a good relationship with their fan base, which makes them all the more likely to buy their next game. How do they filter out the bad ideas and deal with the forum crazies? Brad's a forum crazy himself, he'll call people out and tell them they're insane if he thinks their suggestions suck.
One common suggestion Brad has to shoot down is to introduce turrets to GalCiv: individual guns on ships that each have their own physics and shoot individually: that would require astronomical processing power and greatly increase the minimum specs for the game, which Brad wants to avoid so he can sell the game to a wider audience. Some fans still feel it'll be worth the sacrifice but disagreement on such issues is unavoidable. Fans will always complain anyway if Stardock releases a patch that fixes exploits or overpowered features, people don't like having their favourite strategies undermined. It can be frustrating for Stackdock if they worked hard on an update with hundreds of fixes and improvements and people focus on one tiny little issue they got wrong. But they learned by now that it's usually the same 5 or 6 people who post all the complaining.
They still have their own QA department, though that's mostly focused on their non-game products like WindowBlinds and at stability and performance testing and the like. Actual playtesting and balancing is all done by the beta program and the developers themselves (which Brad says is easier anyway). The worst part of QA though is fixing typos: there are hundreds of pages of text so they're a lot of work to check but it's important because reviewers always comment on them, which reflects poorly on the game.
- What games is Brad playing himself?
A lot of Company of Heroes and Team Fortress 2. He's not played Peggle yet (which is very popular with the GFW crew) because Jeff Green (one of the hosts) has said in the past that that game will "destroy your life". Brad has that same experience with Desktop Tower Defense. He's also not played Audiosurf yet (another GFW favourite) but he's seen it: they have that game at Stardock now because they're adding it to Impulse (see further).
- Piracy
Piracy is a hot issue in the games industry right now and a major reason why a lot of game developers have recently come out (especially at GDC) to say that PC gaming is dead. Brad feels there's always been piracy and it's not going away, in fact it's getting worse with bitTorrent. But Brad has a background in non-game software design and says the game industry needs to look at other industries: this is an old problem, he's been dealing with it for years with WindowBlinds and the like. Game publishers see every pirated copy as a lost sale, which isn't the case: most pirates wouldn't have bought the game anyway. In general, game sales haven't actually gone down in recent years: the player base is larger but sales have remained the same.
Publishers should be worried about maximizing sales, not minimizing piracy. They just shouldn't market their games towards the demographic that's likely to pirate. For example, the industry seems to think China is an emerging market for games, but piracy is so rampant there that Brad says nobody should be surprised if they tried to sell their games in China but failed. In the same vain, some demographics in the Western markets are more likely to actually pay for their PC games than others. PC game makers shouldn't focus their efforts on appealing to 17-year-old kids, but rather on older players who tend to play different kinds of games. Brad explains that Adobe PhotoShop gets massively pirated, but Adobe isn't sweating over some 17-year-olds pirating their product, they wouldn't have bought it anyway. If Adobe was like a game publisher though, they'd force graphics designers to have anal exams every time they wanted to run PhotoShop.
- PC vs console
A lot of games do better on consoles because there you have the guarantee that a game will work well, with a PC there's a lot of uncertainty about how well it will run and you have to monkey around with your hardware and settings. Because of this for a lot of multi-platform games Brad himself usually buys the XBox version rather than the PC version. This doesn't work for FPSs for him because he wants to use his mouse and keyboard there, but for other genres it works just as well as on the PC. Any sales are better than no sales, so publishers may still want to release their games on the PC, they just shouldn't market it to people who won't pay for it anyway. Game magazines (like GFW Magazine) are often bought by people who don't actually buy the games, so magazines should be focused on a different set of games than what actually sells well and game makers shouldn't necessarily be obsessed with getting exposure there.
(There's a whole discussion on GFW Magazine which isn't terribly interesting to us, I'm not gonna bother paraphrasing it)
- Games for Windows certification & Games for Windows Live
Games for Windows certification is very tough, there are a lot of stringent requirements. A big portion of the back of the box has to be devoted to system requirements, which goes at the expense of the space that's used to explain what the game is like. There also has to be a big logo on the front, which is less of an issue. The certification process is very slow, it takes many months. For some games that's just not feasible: Political Machine 2008 will be finished like 20 minutes before it ships, so there's just no time to get Games for Windows certification for it.
The certification process involves things like approving how the installer works: in Windows Vista you're only allowed to install games to Games Explorer, you can't have them in the Start Menu or on the Desktop, which really annoys Brad because the search in Windows Vista doesn't search the Games Explorer, making it very hard for people to find their own games. To make matters worse Microsoft's own games don't have this restriction. Also, the game icon can only launch the game itself, not a launcher that lets you configure the graphics settings and the like, which for a lot of games would be much more convenient; users are forced to mess with text files to edit their settings.
There are benefits to the certification though, says Brad, if you have the time to do it it's definitely worthwhile. You get free ads in Games for Windows Magazine, it gets promoted by the Games for Windows programme elsewhere and it also helps with getting retail deals with certain outlets like Walmart, especially promotion-wise.
Games for Windows Live is not something Stardock is taking advantage of because they want to do stuff for free: release free updates and mini-expansions, which Microsoft wants developers to charge for. There are also other restrictions but Stardock didn't really look into it too much because they have their own competing service, they're going directly head-to-head with Microsoft's Games for Windows Live with their upcoming Impulse service. Which leads us to...
- Impulse
[There's been a lot of media coverage of Impulse since this interview, among others fromGamasutra]
Stardock has always had digital distribution, first for their application software, then for their own games as TotalGaming.net, which eventually became so successful they opened it up for other indie developers at their request. Brad didn't really care for this because it was a hassle and he figured every major publisher would eventually have their own distribution channel, they didn't think one system for many developers/publishers was ever going to work. Then this thing called Steam came out.
Brad thought Valve was crazy for allowing their competitors on their private network and for these competitors for paying Valve, until his own users started complaining he needed to put his games on Steam or they wouldn't buy it. That's when they started to take it more seriously: he doesn't want Steam to become a monopoly as much as he likes Valve: if it became an online monopoly like Walmart is for retail it might start charging ridiculous royalties and the like (which so far Valve has been very generous with). Also, Stardock already had its own system long before Steam arrived, why give that up to this new thing?
So Stardock started to combine all their individual networks into a single platform called Impulse, which comes out later this month. Then their business team which normally works on applications, not games, started to contact other major publishers for games and non-games (applications, utilities, anti-virus, etc) alike to get deals with them and get their products on Impulse. Eventually people can submit their own software to Impulse and sell it, manage update, etc all from a single program, much like Steam.
Brad is not worried about having to compete with an established product like Steam. They've been competing with much larger companies for years and always do well, they're just not as famous for it. Stardock doesn't want to drive Steam out of business either, they just want to provide a viable alternative. They also want to innovate this type of service, by for example integrating persistent-world features (like monthly subscriptions) into Impulse, so any developer can make use of those without having to build it themselves. Stardock also wants to make it easier for developers to do min-expansions and keep making new content for existing games. Having a Steam competitor will keep both Steam and Impulse on their toes and have them keep innovating to improve the service.
The main challenge for Impulse right now is getting the content: getting all games worth having on the system. The only kinds of products that will likely not get on there are Valve products like Half-Life, and conversely Stardock products won't be released on Steam, but most other games should be available on both. Publishers like EA and 2K Games and the like are now even coming to Stardock, they don't have to sell their service much to them, so there should be a very strong line-up on launch day.
Features that previous Stardock distribution systems like Stardock Central and TotalGaming.net had will also be available on Impulse, depending on what functionality the individual developers/publishers want to offer. E.g. Brad hopes to have a check box where you can select if you want to have a physicial copy of the game shipped to you, or get a downloadable version. Impulse will also have other features similar to what's available on Steam, like the Steamworks developer tools (which among other things allow for detailed statistics tracking), a good match-making system, etc. Since Steam largely owns the FPS market and Stardock is becoming a leader in the strategy games market, some of the features of Impulse will over time be designed specifically with strategy gamer needs in mind: match-making for strategy games, and persistent servers for storing characters and keeping stats on empire building.
) which we discussed on this week's ModCast. To ease discussion on ModCast I made an extract of most of what Brad said, which I reckon those who prefer the written medium over the audio one may prefer, so I'll post it here as well. Mind that that this is a paraphrasing of the interview, not a transcript. If you want to hear these things from the horse's mouth, download the GFW podcast...Note: this interview was recorded 3 weeks ago, some of the info may be slightly obsolete at this point.
- Is PC Gaming dead?
Brad: no, it's evolving. The old model of a multi-million-dollar advance, long development cycle, buggy release, patch, expansion pack then move on doesn't work anymore. Games have become too expensive and are aimed at very high-end hardware systems that most users don't have. Sales numbers aren't falling, but expectations (and the # of sales needed to break even) have risen.
Sins of a Solar Empire made millions of dollars in the first few days after release, 4 or 5 times more than it cost to make, Stardock consider it a big success. But by the standards of major publishers like EA or Atari (the latter of whom Stardock unsuccessfully negotiated with to publish games like a MoM sequel or Star Control IV) the actual number of sales isn't nearly sufficient, they don't care about anything that will sell less than a million copies. Major game publishers are now (unlike in the 80s and 90s) publically-traded companies and are as such too strongly focused on maximizing gross revenue, not net profit.
Games like WoW and the Sims are anomalies, not the norm, says Brad. If you develop a game you can't expect that's how well it will do. Focus on making a profit, not maximizing revenue.
- Sales: digital distribution & Walmart
Sins of a Solar Empire sold roughly as many copies through digital distribution as at retail but digital distribution is twice as profitable because there's no middle man [by comparison, GalCiv2 sold far more at retail than through digital distribution but still made more money from the latter, red]. It's also very popular at Walmart, but since NPD doesn't count either Walmart sales or digital distribution SoSE won't show up on the NPD top-selling games list. If those two channels were counted SoSE would probably be the top-selling game right now. GalCiv2 also did really well at Walmart, Brad doesn't know why his products are so popular there.
- Sins of a Solar Empire
SoSE is doing much better than GalCiv2 in sales, which gives Brad as the GC2 designer mixed feelings. The expectation was that SoSE would do about as well as GalCiv2, as it was a new game from a new developer (Ironclad Games) and it came out in the busy holiday season where there's little press coverage and very strong competition. But in reality it's so far selling at a rate that's 1.6 or 1.7 times better than GalCiv2 did. Overall GalCiv2 sold around 300,000 copies, SoSE is at 200,000 copies in the first 45 days.
When Stardock decided to become a game publisher they wanted to do things differently than traditional publishers, they wanted to integrate the Stardock and Ironclad teams so Stardock would be part of the development process and Ironclad would be part of the marketing process and they could both fill holes where needed. This was discussed for a long time and Ironclad was very open to this idea.
The empire tree in SoSE was a very revolutionary concept that Brad thought was genius. It seemed scary at first in screenshots but works brilliant when playing the game. Brad talked about how he could steal this idea without anyone noticing until he realised he was saying that on a podcast and this was being reported
- Political Machine 2008
Political Machine is a strategy game about the US elections that's a follow-up of a 2004 version. This version is far, far better though, according to Brad. The engine used is a brand-new 3D engine taken from the yet-unannounced fantasy strategy game Stardock is also working on. It has a fully customisable character creation tool, so you can completely design your own character and control how large their head is, what clothes they're wearing, etc -- it's almost Spore-like in how much design freedom you have. Or you can play with Obama, Clinton, McCain, etc.
- GalCiv2: Twilight of the Arnor
GalCiv2 has a similar custom race design feature, and in Twilight of the Arnor that will be taken to the next level: in TotA every race has its own completely unique tech tree, which means in the custom race designer you can create your own custom tech tree as well. The whole unique tech tree was a "really dumb" idea though: it was waaay more work than Brad realised. Everything ties into the tech tree, so not only did Stardock have to design like 7 completely unique trees, they also had to design hundreds of new improvements, ships, etc to go along with it.
TotA is the end of the road for GalCiv2, the last expansion. So Stardock is throwing everything including the kitchen sink at it, which is not in any way cost-effective but Brad is willing to suck that up. It'll have something like 7 different editors so you can make your own future expansions if you like: they will be very polished so you can go nuts with it, they'll allow you to design your own races, your own units, etc.
- GalCiv3 and future projects
The biggest things still on the wishlist that won't make it into TotA are multiplayer, tactical battles and even better AI. These things will be in a GalCiv3 if Stardock ever makes one, but it'll be years and years before they get around to that. Before then they still have Political Machine to finish, as well as their unannounced fantasy strategy game, their MMO RTS Society and they'll be publishing other games by other developers. Tomorrow Stardock will be announcing another major new game they're going to be publishing, which is scheduled for a release next February [update: this turned out to be Demigod]. The February after that (so in 2010) they hope to be releasing their own fantasy strategy game. Only when all that is done they may do a GalCiv3.
So far all of Stardock's releases have been strategy games but that doesn't mean they're a strategy-only publisher. Brad also really wants to do an RPG some day, he really wants to see another Baldur's Gate or PlaneScape Torment, he feels nobody's making those kind of games anymore (he's not played the Witcher yet though).
- Fantasy strategy game
The yet-unannounced fantasy strategy game (which will have an extended beta program) will be sort of Master of Magic-like (i.e. a turn-based tactical-combat game with multiplayer), in which you can design your own units, you have all sorts of cool spells and it has a very cool zoom feature: if you zoom all the way out the map will become a cloth map a la LotR, but if you're all zoomed in it's very detailed and you can see individual leaves on trees. Players can submit their own content and release that through an in-game feature so you don't have to downloads mods from the web, a little bit like Spore (although Stardock has been working on it for a long, long time). The game will be turn-based because Brad likes games where you (as a player) don't feel rushed.
This game will not a MoM clone however, as Stardock will be adding a lot of new game mechanics and technology has come a long way. For example, it will have a 3D engine and when you start the game you start in a world that has been totally devastated and you have to decide whether you'll be good or evil. If you choose to be good your character comes back to life and you can see plants and trees growing as you progress through the game and it's really pretty. But if you're evil it looks like Mordor and the world will become very nasty and scary. This kind of texture mapping on a 3D surface just wasn't technologically possible when MoM came out.
- Brad's responsibilities
Brad is an AI programmer. When asked if he's considered to quit doing that and just run the business side of things, if he could afford doing that at this point, he says he doubts it. AI programming is very tricky and it takes a lot of experience to get it right, plus he just loves doing it, he doesn't want to quit.
- Game testing
When asked how Stardock tests some of the immense changes they introduce in TotA and the like, Brad says that's Stardock's dirty little secret: their beta program. They just let their users (who preordered the games) test everything. It takes longer to publish the game that way but they get a lot of feedback this way and maintain a good relationship with their fan base, which makes them all the more likely to buy their next game. How do they filter out the bad ideas and deal with the forum crazies? Brad's a forum crazy himself, he'll call people out and tell them they're insane if he thinks their suggestions suck.
One common suggestion Brad has to shoot down is to introduce turrets to GalCiv: individual guns on ships that each have their own physics and shoot individually: that would require astronomical processing power and greatly increase the minimum specs for the game, which Brad wants to avoid so he can sell the game to a wider audience. Some fans still feel it'll be worth the sacrifice but disagreement on such issues is unavoidable. Fans will always complain anyway if Stardock releases a patch that fixes exploits or overpowered features, people don't like having their favourite strategies undermined. It can be frustrating for Stackdock if they worked hard on an update with hundreds of fixes and improvements and people focus on one tiny little issue they got wrong. But they learned by now that it's usually the same 5 or 6 people who post all the complaining.
They still have their own QA department, though that's mostly focused on their non-game products like WindowBlinds and at stability and performance testing and the like. Actual playtesting and balancing is all done by the beta program and the developers themselves (which Brad says is easier anyway). The worst part of QA though is fixing typos: there are hundreds of pages of text so they're a lot of work to check but it's important because reviewers always comment on them, which reflects poorly on the game.
- What games is Brad playing himself?
A lot of Company of Heroes and Team Fortress 2. He's not played Peggle yet (which is very popular with the GFW crew) because Jeff Green (one of the hosts) has said in the past that that game will "destroy your life". Brad has that same experience with Desktop Tower Defense. He's also not played Audiosurf yet (another GFW favourite) but he's seen it: they have that game at Stardock now because they're adding it to Impulse (see further).
- Piracy
Piracy is a hot issue in the games industry right now and a major reason why a lot of game developers have recently come out (especially at GDC) to say that PC gaming is dead. Brad feels there's always been piracy and it's not going away, in fact it's getting worse with bitTorrent. But Brad has a background in non-game software design and says the game industry needs to look at other industries: this is an old problem, he's been dealing with it for years with WindowBlinds and the like. Game publishers see every pirated copy as a lost sale, which isn't the case: most pirates wouldn't have bought the game anyway. In general, game sales haven't actually gone down in recent years: the player base is larger but sales have remained the same.
Publishers should be worried about maximizing sales, not minimizing piracy. They just shouldn't market their games towards the demographic that's likely to pirate. For example, the industry seems to think China is an emerging market for games, but piracy is so rampant there that Brad says nobody should be surprised if they tried to sell their games in China but failed. In the same vain, some demographics in the Western markets are more likely to actually pay for their PC games than others. PC game makers shouldn't focus their efforts on appealing to 17-year-old kids, but rather on older players who tend to play different kinds of games. Brad explains that Adobe PhotoShop gets massively pirated, but Adobe isn't sweating over some 17-year-olds pirating their product, they wouldn't have bought it anyway. If Adobe was like a game publisher though, they'd force graphics designers to have anal exams every time they wanted to run PhotoShop.
- PC vs console
A lot of games do better on consoles because there you have the guarantee that a game will work well, with a PC there's a lot of uncertainty about how well it will run and you have to monkey around with your hardware and settings. Because of this for a lot of multi-platform games Brad himself usually buys the XBox version rather than the PC version. This doesn't work for FPSs for him because he wants to use his mouse and keyboard there, but for other genres it works just as well as on the PC. Any sales are better than no sales, so publishers may still want to release their games on the PC, they just shouldn't market it to people who won't pay for it anyway. Game magazines (like GFW Magazine) are often bought by people who don't actually buy the games, so magazines should be focused on a different set of games than what actually sells well and game makers shouldn't necessarily be obsessed with getting exposure there.
(There's a whole discussion on GFW Magazine which isn't terribly interesting to us, I'm not gonna bother paraphrasing it)
- Games for Windows certification & Games for Windows Live
Games for Windows certification is very tough, there are a lot of stringent requirements. A big portion of the back of the box has to be devoted to system requirements, which goes at the expense of the space that's used to explain what the game is like. There also has to be a big logo on the front, which is less of an issue. The certification process is very slow, it takes many months. For some games that's just not feasible: Political Machine 2008 will be finished like 20 minutes before it ships, so there's just no time to get Games for Windows certification for it.
The certification process involves things like approving how the installer works: in Windows Vista you're only allowed to install games to Games Explorer, you can't have them in the Start Menu or on the Desktop, which really annoys Brad because the search in Windows Vista doesn't search the Games Explorer, making it very hard for people to find their own games. To make matters worse Microsoft's own games don't have this restriction. Also, the game icon can only launch the game itself, not a launcher that lets you configure the graphics settings and the like, which for a lot of games would be much more convenient; users are forced to mess with text files to edit their settings.
There are benefits to the certification though, says Brad, if you have the time to do it it's definitely worthwhile. You get free ads in Games for Windows Magazine, it gets promoted by the Games for Windows programme elsewhere and it also helps with getting retail deals with certain outlets like Walmart, especially promotion-wise.
Games for Windows Live is not something Stardock is taking advantage of because they want to do stuff for free: release free updates and mini-expansions, which Microsoft wants developers to charge for. There are also other restrictions but Stardock didn't really look into it too much because they have their own competing service, they're going directly head-to-head with Microsoft's Games for Windows Live with their upcoming Impulse service. Which leads us to...
- Impulse
[There's been a lot of media coverage of Impulse since this interview, among others fromGamasutra]
Stardock has always had digital distribution, first for their application software, then for their own games as TotalGaming.net, which eventually became so successful they opened it up for other indie developers at their request. Brad didn't really care for this because it was a hassle and he figured every major publisher would eventually have their own distribution channel, they didn't think one system for many developers/publishers was ever going to work. Then this thing called Steam came out.
Brad thought Valve was crazy for allowing their competitors on their private network and for these competitors for paying Valve, until his own users started complaining he needed to put his games on Steam or they wouldn't buy it. That's when they started to take it more seriously: he doesn't want Steam to become a monopoly as much as he likes Valve: if it became an online monopoly like Walmart is for retail it might start charging ridiculous royalties and the like (which so far Valve has been very generous with). Also, Stardock already had its own system long before Steam arrived, why give that up to this new thing?
So Stardock started to combine all their individual networks into a single platform called Impulse, which comes out later this month. Then their business team which normally works on applications, not games, started to contact other major publishers for games and non-games (applications, utilities, anti-virus, etc) alike to get deals with them and get their products on Impulse. Eventually people can submit their own software to Impulse and sell it, manage update, etc all from a single program, much like Steam.
Brad is not worried about having to compete with an established product like Steam. They've been competing with much larger companies for years and always do well, they're just not as famous for it. Stardock doesn't want to drive Steam out of business either, they just want to provide a viable alternative. They also want to innovate this type of service, by for example integrating persistent-world features (like monthly subscriptions) into Impulse, so any developer can make use of those without having to build it themselves. Stardock also wants to make it easier for developers to do min-expansions and keep making new content for existing games. Having a Steam competitor will keep both Steam and Impulse on their toes and have them keep innovating to improve the service.
The main challenge for Impulse right now is getting the content: getting all games worth having on the system. The only kinds of products that will likely not get on there are Valve products like Half-Life, and conversely Stardock products won't be released on Steam, but most other games should be available on both. Publishers like EA and 2K Games and the like are now even coming to Stardock, they don't have to sell their service much to them, so there should be a very strong line-up on launch day.
Features that previous Stardock distribution systems like Stardock Central and TotalGaming.net had will also be available on Impulse, depending on what functionality the individual developers/publishers want to offer. E.g. Brad hopes to have a check box where you can select if you want to have a physicial copy of the game shipped to you, or get a downloadable version. Impulse will also have other features similar to what's available on Steam, like the Steamworks developer tools (which among other things allow for detailed statistics tracking), a good match-making system, etc. Since Steam largely owns the FPS market and Stardock is becoming a leader in the strategy games market, some of the features of Impulse will over time be designed specifically with strategy gamer needs in mind: match-making for strategy games, and persistent servers for storing characters and keeping stats on empire building.
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