I'm very happy to see people like Mr Wardell commenting on the websites I read. Makes me feel listened to. Or at least.. observed. On the spectrum, I'm between a confidant and an animal in a zoo. Either way, it's better than further down, where I'm a sack of money held in contempt.
Where I get a bit annoyed with developers isn't for choosing a DRM solution between Steam and GFWL, but because they want this whole matchmaking thing, which makes life difficult for people who know what they're doing. Great for the new people, a pain in the ass for the ones who've been here a while. But that's not the point of today's interview, so I guess this is off topic...
Competition is amazingly good. What's annoying about using more than one digital distribution service is that I need to actually have multiple programs running on my PC. I buy game A, B and C, and to play them, I need to launch digital distribution software X, Y and Z to run it. What's upsetting isn't just the memory and runtime taken by these, but if software X has an integrated friends list, chatroom, clan/group system, and it's tightly built in, why the hell should I use software Y or Z when it means I have to effectively abandon/ignore my friends and clan? I use Steam to chat with my friends as much, if not more than MSN Messenger, which is abstractly a messaging system.
If Stardock -really- want Impulse to be competitve, then they should see about creating a system for chatting and networking that is independant of their software, beating Valve to it, and perfecting it until Valve use it too, and I can keep my group together. Until then, I can't really use Impulse at all - it's back to square one, with noone kept together.
Steam doesn't have a monopoly on my gaming, but it does have a monopoly on my communications. For me, that's way more important to me than where my games come from.