Impulse

» see impulsedriven.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

A download store sells you a license and an assumption. The assumption is that in five years the license will still resolve to a file on a server somewhere. Impulse is what it looks like when the second half stops being true.

Stardock had been running Stardock Central since 2001, a small updater that delivered its own strategy games to the people who bought them. Impulse was the version of that opened to other publishers, launched on 17 June 2008, and it arrived with an argument attached. Stardock spent that year publishing a Gamer's Bill of Rights and building a store around it: no always-on connection required to play, no install limits, the download tied to your account rather than to the machine you first used. Steam at the time required its client running to launch anything you had bought from it, and a lot of people found that offensive on principle.

The store worked. Activision and Ubisoft put releases on it, the client handled installs and updates without complaint, and a library called Impulse::Reactor gave developers achievements and multiplayer lobbies without going through Valve. For about two years, if you asked which store was second, the answer was this one and it was not close.

Turkey in 2008 was not a two-store market. It was barely a one-store market. Games came in boxes from a shop, or they came off a hard drive at an internet cafe, and paying a foreign site by card for a download you could never sell on was still a new idea. When digital buying did settle in it settled as Steam, singular, with no second account beside it. Impulse was competing to be an alternative in a market that had not yet finished having a default.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what stardock was proving ~

The Gamer's Bill of Rights was ten points long and it reads today like a list of everything the industry went on to do anyway. Games should install without a serial number typed off a sticker. Buyers should be able to reinstall without asking permission. A publisher going out of business should not take your copy with it.

Stardock could take that position because it published its own games and did not need a hit from anyone else to make payroll. That was the strength and the limit at the same time. A store built as a demonstration of principle does not out-spend a store built as a platform, and Valve was busy turning Steam into a place people opened whether or not they were buying something. Impulse had a better contract with the customer. Steam had the customer.

~ the gamestop years ~

GameStop announced it was buying Impulse in March 2011 and closed the purchase on 2 May, alongside a game-streaming outfit called Spawn Labs. On paper it made sense, a used-disc retailer buying its way into downloads before downloads finished eating the shelves. In practice the store was renamed GameStop PC Downloads, the client was renamed the GameStop App, and then almost nothing happened to it. The last stable build shipped on 2 August 2012 and never got a successor.

On 24 April 2014 the client and the web store were discontinued and impulsedriven.com started redirecting to gamestop.com. Customer service kept handing out legacy download links by request until February 2019, which was a courtesy rather than a service, and then that stopped as well. What is left is a set of purchases with no server behind them and a company that still exists and no longer has a mechanism to help. The Bill of Rights had a clause about exactly this. The store that wrote it got sold to someone who had not signed it.

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