Stardock Interview

While there isn’t any specific mention about Demigod or Elemental: War of Magic, Gamasutra is offering up an article-style interview with Stardock’s Brad Wardell about their Impulse service, their plans to roll out the Impulse: Reactor SDK beta later this month, why developers don’t want to allow their customers to sell and trade digital copies of games, and more.

(There’s too much risk as a PC gamer buying a game, and that’s one of the big reasons people buy consoles,) he argues, citing friends who bought Oblivion on a console simply because they were sure that version would work correctly. (It wouldn’t be such a big deal if they could return the [digital PC] game, but right now what would happen is you’d buy it . and it doesn’t work, you’re just out of luck, too bad.)

Ideally, Wardell said he’d like PC gamers to be able to further mitigate their risk of buying a digital download by having the option to resell their digital purchase to another player. In fact, Impulse already lets developers allow their consumers that exact freedom, he says. The only problem is, no developer seems to want to support the feature.

(The problem is, in order to make it work, you have to have the user go on the internet every time they play the game,) Wardell said. (If you do that right now, the gamers will go on your Amazon or something and just flame you. But you have to have that… there’s no way to have a transferable license without that.)

Despite this, Wardell sees the idea of transferable digital licenses as inevitable, especially once persistent internet access becomes truly ubiquitous for all computers. But that doesn’t mean developers and publishers are going to be cut out of the market, like they are in second-hand retail.