Stardock isn’t a publicly traded company, though it strives to be as open as possible about its business. This is where the annual Stardock Customer Report (PDF link) comes in, an annual assessment of the company’s financial situation. Stardock, a publisher of games such as Sins of a Solar Empire, is also behind digital distribution service Impulse, which boss Brad Wardell says is the second only to Valve’s Steam platform in terms of revenue generation.
“Our estimation is that Steam – as the current market leader – enjoys approximately 70 percent of the overall digital distribution market with Impulse at 10 percent and all others combined at 20 percent in terms of actual dollars generated per month,” Wardell explains. As Wardell estimates, 25 percent of PC platform sales will come from digital distribution channels during 2009’s calendar year, so we’re talking billions of dollars here.
“Steam and Impulse both have the advantage of exclusive content (Left 4 Dead, Half-Life, Sins of a Solar Empire, Demigod, etc.),” he adds, but explains that Valve’s strides in getting major publishers to sign on for Steamworks as a DRM solution (Dawn of War II, Modern Warfare 2) effectively nullifies those games’ chances of appearing on Impulse. This is a big area where Impulse is missing out and even though it offers its own alternative — Impulse Reactor — the company already missed the boat on its share of the big, fat money-filled pie.
[Via Gamasutra]
Source – Stardock Customer Report 2009 (PDF)
Stardock: Steam is top digital distribution earner, Impulse second originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on November 20th, 2009 at 9:30pm by David Hinkle
Filed Under: business, digital-distribution, impulse, stardock, steam, valve
Where did you buy your last MMO and where will you buy your next? Chances are you’ll be getting it on Steam or so the story goes according to Brad Wardell, head honcho over at Stardock. We’re inclined to agree with his assertion that Valve’s digital distribution platform holds roughly 70% of the PC market as many of us here at Massively have been buying our MMOs — and PC games in general — on the service for some time now.
So is it a good thing or a bad thing for MMO players? Our experience with purchasing games like Aion and Champions Online through the service has been positive, and so long as no complications arise via patches or other client issues we see no reason to stop utilizing the service unless better offers appear.
The only real MMO-related issue we can see is with collector’s editions. Some games offer a different set of bonus material for people who opt out of the physical copy and go for the digital, but certain items like art books, mouse pads and other bric-a-brac can’t be delivered through a wire… at least, not until sometime in the far flung future.
Now, as far as the Steamworks integration issue goes… Well, that’s a whole other sack of fishes.
Filed under: MMO industry, News items, Opinion
Steam estimated at selling to 70% of PC market originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on November 20th, 2009 at 8:00pm by Kyle Horner
Filed Under: aion, atari, brad-wardell, champions, champions-online, digital-distribution, eurogamer, impulse, ncsoft, opinion, stardock, steam, valve
Player created quests are the hot trend right now, and
Star Wars Galaxies is right there with it. Since the creation of
the Chronicle Master system, over 3 million quests have been created by the always active
Star Wars Galaxies community. Way to go guys! Oh, and did we mention that the system has only been available for under a month? No? Well, we did now.
And, to kill two topics with one post, Star Wars Galaxies has gone on sale this weekend on Steam. You can get the complete collection of the game for only $10 instead of the usual $20. While the game is certainly a little dated, the community is truly proving that it’s worth the $10 cost. You’re going to get immersed in a lot of imagination for that small sum of money.
Filed under: Sci-fi, Culture, Events, in-game, News items, Star Wars Galaxies, Roleplaying
Star Wars Galaxies celebrates over 3 million player created quests originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on November 20th, 2009 at 7:00pm by Seraphina Brennan
Filed Under: 3-million-quests, chronicle-master, community, imagination, sale, star-wars-complete-online-chronicles, star-wars-galaxies, steam, swg
In case you may not have noticed, games have slowly been moving towards being services rather than stand alone products. New releases, from the biggest blockbuster to the lowliest PSN of Xbox Live Arcade game, are now frowned upon if they don’t include some sort of internet-based shenanigans either through online multiplayer, or even just simple leaderboards to compare your scores with your mates.
World of Warcraft and Runescape are the most obvious examples of games that are services. In fact everything from Modern Warfare 2 to Shadox Complex has some sort of online service incorporated into them.
“Service is becoming everything,” underlined Valve’s Jason Holtman during his Montreal International Game Summit keynote. “It’s going to impact every line of business and every line as you think about your game.”
Of course Steam is the perfect example of games delivered as services. They boast 20 million users worldwide and a catalogue of 950 games, all of which are automatically updated when Steam is running on your PC.
These include titles like Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead, both of which have been constantly updated since they launched. Team Fortress 2 alone has seen 97 updates that include new content as well as patches and fixes, and all provided for free.
“The direct customer relationship means now that you shouldn’t think of your product as ‘finished’ — a single piece that goes out monolithically. You should think of your product or the game you’re making as an ongoing service to your customer,” Holtman adds.
Of course, the services that Steam provides to its customers are also provided in a lesser fashion across the major consoles with updates downloaded automatically when they are available.
LittleBigPlanet is another fine example of how a game has grown into a service, with the community now topping 1.3 million user-generated levels. Over the year since its release, Media Molecule has been just as busy keeping the game up-to-date and running smoothly as they were developing it having now patched it 25 times. Paul Holden, lead architect behind the game, believes in the the importance of good community support.
“We realised pretty quickly how important it is to ensure the quality of the releases and the patches,” he said in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz at MIGS. “It’s surprising that even fairly small changes that we’ve made have had large impacts on the community.”
Community maintenance is key to LittleBigPlanet’s continued success. Holden continues, “By releasing regular content we keep people interested. Once we release a big pack we can see a big uptake in the number of people playing. If you look at companies like Blizzard with StarCraft, or Bungie and Valve, they look after their communities by releasing regular content and updates, and in turn the community responds well to that kind of attention.”
He adds, “The next patch to go out is 1.21 which should have a whole bunch of new features that have been in the pipeline for some time. And then there’s more planned for well into next year. Sony’s been very keen for us to support the game ourselves. A lot of publishers are keen to move on once a game has been released and patched but Sony has been very keen to give us the resources we need to support the game in this way.”
In an industry still dominated by monolithic blockbuster titles and analysts claiming that marketing sells games more than quality does it is refreshing to see that there are some big names ready to stick their necks out and say that it’s the players and communities that games build that are important and that quality really does matter.
Amen to that.
Thanks to Gamasutra and GamesIndustry.biz.
Posted on November 18th, 2009 at 7:05pm by [email protected] (The Games Are Evil Family)
Filed Under: James Holtman, MIGS 2009, Montreal International Games Summit 2009, News, Paul-holden, features, left-4-dead, littlebigplanet, media-molecule, opinion, sony, steam, team-fortress-2, valve
Speaking to GI.biz, Valve’s head of Steam, Jason Holtman, had some interesting things to say about the company’s frequent deals and their effect on long-term game sales. According to Holtman, Steam’s quick game sales — offering Team Fortress 2 for $2.49 for only a few hours last month, for example — don’t have a negative impact on a game’s long-term performance. Holtman notes that once a brick-and-mortar retailer reduces a game’s price, people are reticent to ever pay a higher price again, but downloadable games are different. “You can have sales that are dramatically low and bring the price back up and people don’t care,” said Holtman, “They don’t care at all.”
Regarding the $2.49 Team Fortress 2 sale last month, Holtman said that sales actually increased the following weekend — after it went back to full price. He also mentioned Steam’s previous half-off sale of Left 4 Dead, noting that it didn’t hurt retail sales at all (readers will recall that Valve claimed that it actually boosted retail sales). Holtman stated that it’s possible to run several promotions without “sacrificing” either downloadable or retail sales, and added, “You don’t have to hurt somebody to win.”
Valve: Short-term Steam deals don’t hurt long-term performance originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on November 18th, 2009 at 6:15am by Richard Mitchell
Filed Under: business, digital-distribution, downloadable, left-4-dead, steam, team-fortress-2, valve
