Impulse might be more of a turkey than a golden goose, says the digital distribution boss.
If GameStop is hoping to stave off obsolescence in an age of digital distribution, buying Stardock’s Impulse platform might not have been the right way to go about it. That’s the feelings of Theo Bergquist, the CEO of rival digital distribution platform, GamersGate, who offered a rather damning look at GameStop latest acquisition.
Bergquist said that despite appearing to have promise at the start, Impulse had not grown into the Steam-beating service that people had hoped. He referred to Impluse as Steam’s “lesser talented stepchild,” adding that it didn’t have enough users or games, but had plenty of outdated technology. He thought that GameStop probably hadn’t had to pay very much to acquire the service, if it had actually paid anything upfront at all. Despite this belief, he said that unless Impulse had some features that were essentially ready to go, GameStop might still have bought itself something of a lemon.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom from Bergquist however. He thought that Impulse could very well benefit from GameStop’s years of retail experience, as he felt that the service had long lacked a proper retail focus. If GameStop was smart, he said, it could grow the service into something to give Steam a run for its money. On the other hand, if it wasn’t smart, GameStop might put itself in a position where starting from scratch on a digital distribution platform would have been a better idea.
This isn’t the first time that Bergquist has had less than complementary things to say about his rivals. In February, he said that GamersGate had nearly doubled its user base, a lot of which had to do with people’s dissatisfaction with Steam. He also felt it would be GamersGate, and not Steam, that casual gamers would find more appealing when they started buying more games online.
Source: Industry Gamers
Published: Apr 6, 2011 01:43 pm