Spammo un po' di roba, perchè sul forum di elemental i tipi di stardock non si fanno certo pregare per aprir bocca, specialmente il CEO.. (avrei messo sotto spoiler se funzionasse come quello di TGM; ma qui invece annerisce la linea no?)
Utente random: Ballsy move selling Impulse. Seems odd that someone who was previously a champion of the conglomerate model has rejected it so thoroughly.
I mean, you've said a million times that you derived significant advantages from having multiple income streams (desktop apps, publishing, retail, games). Why the sudden urge to dump one of the fastest growing segments? I suppose not wanting to run a big company makes sense, but there's no reason you couldn't have pulled a founder fadeback like the Twitter guy did and hire a biz guy to CEO while you focus on the fun stuff (and own the joint). And why a sale rather than spinning the company off as an independent entity or firewalling it from the development company (which presumably was already in effect, since Impulse Inc exists)?
Pots of money is a damned good reason, but it doesn't seem like that's the driving force here when you're out and out saying that being huge isn't appealing. Anyway, Impulse was presumably generating pots of money all on its own, so that's doubly implausible.
And that Joystiq interview did not ask any interesting questions.
Stardock CEO: I guess the quick answer is to ask everyone here a question: How many different things can you focus on at once?
Let's look at War of Magic as one example. Why did it suck at launch? Lack of money? Nope. We could have delayed it. Lack of time? Nope, it had 3 years of development. So you tell me, why did War of Magic suck at release?
To answer that you need to really make sure you're not looking at Stardock as "a company" but rather a collection of individuals. People matter.
On GalCiv II and Sins of a Solar Empire, myself, Brian Clair (former editor of Avault) and countless others were focused ONLY on those games. That's it.
By the time Demigod rolled around, we were spending huge amounts of time on Impulse instead. Why? Because it was making a ton of money.
People are always saying how they would reject empire building their company and instead focus on making excellent things. But they reject the premise that others would do that too. I don't want to put too fine a point on this but I'm already rich and have been for a long time. But even I got tempted to focus on Impulse because it's so successful.
You know what is key to making great stuff? People. It's not the money. You have to have really talented people and if you spread them too thin, well, you've seen the results.
You know what I go to do this weekend? I got to spend it evaluating hash table fragmentation. For me, that's wonderful. I haven't got to spend time debugging anything in a long time. Normally, I'd be approving contracts for new publishers or looking over proposed Impulse Weekend promotions.
Then you have the people who say "Why not just hire out for that?" We're in Michigan. I haven't even been able to find a qualified lead game developer for Stardock. Barring relocating to Dallas, Boston, Seattle, San Fran or LA, we knew what we'd need to do.
Sorry to ramble but hopefully this helps.
Utente random: how or will you ensure that Gamespot continues in the spirit that Impulse was created and provide a DRM free and customer focused experience?
Stardock CEO: I've read a lot of demonizing of Gamestop which is really a bit of a bummer because when you're talking about an $8 billion company there's a lot of different "parts".
Gamestop was interested in Impulse IMO because of the way we treat our customers. Gamestop went out and brought in gamers to run the thing (Steve Nix and David Adams are the ones running the show and they're from our industry as opposed to say retail or business).
While there are no guarantees in life, my impression has been that they plan to win by providing a more consumer friendly service than the competition. For example, they were very interested in adopting Impulse::Reactor's GOO (which is a very friendly DRM system).
Not to put too fine a point on it but we had a *lot* of choices. For the past year and a half we've been getting offers on Impulse pretty regularly. We went with Gamestop because they had the team and plan most congruent with what we wanted to do.
But let's put all that aside. Gamestop was able to sell their vision to the Impulse employees. Keep in mind, they were able to get the Impulse employees to agree to move across the country for this. And for those of you not familiar with the Stardock culture, we're zealots. We're not in this for the money. We like to do cool stuff and that includes the Impulse team. They even got Zoomba to go and some of you should know what he's like after all these years.
Utente random: Will you still have control over when you patch? So if you wanted to patch the game at 2am like you did one time, or on a Saturday or Sunday, would you still be able to do that?
Stardock CEO: Yep. SDE will continue to be able to bypass the normal release system to put up updates as often as needed.
