Impulse/GameStop Interview

PC Gamer is next up to the plate with an interview with Stardock’s Brad Wardell about GameStop’s somewhat surprising acquisition of their Impulse service. A brighter future for PC gaming, I hope:

How does this strengthen Impulse’s position in the online market in particular? Before, its main selling point was you can only get Stardock games here. What is it now?

There is a whole bunch of things. GameStop is the world’s largest game retailer so you are going to have millions of new people coming to it. It’s a great thing for PC gaming because Impulse has always had to fight with the other parts of Stardock for development resources. Now, they’ve put an amazing team over there on a development side and since the entire Impulse dev team is going over there, continuing on with Impulse Inc. things like Impulse reactor and other projects we’ve had under development will be greatly sped up in their development then they’ve had now, which will be great for gamers.

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So what else does this mean for gamers?

For PC gamers, this is gigantic. For years, guys like you and me have been complaining about the marginalization of PC gaming because as a practical matter, the channels for people to get games has been shrinking. We’ve seen where there’s been so many rationalization on why this is, but the fact of the matter is we’ve lost a lot of our channels. Now boom, GameStop is making a massive investment to bring the PC gaming market back into the mainstream, back into the thick of things. I think it says something that, up until now, we’ve been relying on a couple of PC game developers to carry this load. If you think about who’s been leading this market, Paradox is the one who founded Gamers Gate, and Valve with Steam, and Stardock with Impulse. Well, now the PC gaming market is going to have the world’s leading game retailer really backing it. And that’s going to help our market tremendously.