# Impulse, GameStop and Blind Mind Studios



## DMZ (Apr 10, 2011)

Well if your a PC gamer you should know about this! Game Stop really is not for pc gamers (Because they cant resell the games and get 100% profit) and I am glad a small company stepped up.

*Blind Mind Studios*

On March 31st, Stardock Systems announced that Impulse will be purchased by GameStop, likely some time in May. Due to a rather large list of things we detest about GameStop, Star Ruler will no longer be available for purchase on Impulse after the takeover. Impulse users will hopefully be able to continue receiving automatic updates after the sale; in any case, the patches hosted on our site are compatible with the Impulse version.

We are ending sales through Impulse due to GameStop's long, negative behavior toward the PC platform and independent games. We would never have signed onto distribution through GameStop, and being forced into this situation has only made it worse for us. We feel GameStop cannot serve as the leader of a true competitor in the digital distribution market.

I want to stress that our interactions with Impulse have been consistently good. We would've had no issues with continuing to sell on their service, and we had every intention of being on their service for future games; so long as they were owned by Stardock. However, with the announcement of the merger, and due to the nature of our contract, we had to decide rather quickly what we would do. After a lot of discussion and debates, we arrived at these key points:

GameStop's business practices stand opposed to our goals.
We feel they would not respect our customers.
GameStop consistently focuses only on large budget titles and safe bets, shying away from the independent market.
We supported Brad Wardell's direction of Impulse, and his absence ruins our faith in the service's future.

Impulse Customers: You are not being abandoned! We will be trying to arrange the continuation of automatic updates through Impulse. If this doesn't work out, our patches are all compatible with the Impulse version, and we will be working on an automatic updater for all of our customers to make the update process simpler.

We thank you for your time and apologize for the suddenness of this news and the confusion surrounding it. Things have been very busy as patch 1070 had just come out when we heard about all this and we haven't been able to be as proactive as we would've liked to be on this matter. For that, we apologize, and hope that you understand both our reasoning and that we will honor your sale of Star Ruler with the support it deserves, no matter what our distribution agreements are, to the best of our ability.

Star Ruler to no longer be available on Impulse


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