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Games Entertainment

Stardock - From Indie Developer to Publisher 28

Posted by Zonk from the growing-up-gamer dept.
Consumed_Crustacean writes "GameDaily has an interview with Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock Systems. In the interview, they discuss Stardock's transition from a smallish independent developer to a full-blown publisher (both retail and online). Of particular interest is the discussion on DRM and their online distribution, which Wardell opposes, and said 'Software piracy is something that tends to be overblown. The question for us boils down to the number of sales lost due to piracy versus the number of sales lost due to people not wanting to be inconvenienced.'"
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Stardock - From Indie Developer to Publisher More

Stardock - From Indie Developer to Publisher

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  • Amen (Score:3, Insightful)

    by n9uxu8 ( 729360 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @03:48PM (#14600705) Homepage
    Brother...

    Glad to see a publisher that can at least factor the consumer experience into the drm equation...

    Dave

  • A Soft-DRM in practice! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RingDev ( 879105 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @03:56PM (#14600750) Homepage Journal
    "Our goal is to make it very convenient to purchase our software and somewhat inconvenient to pirate it."

    That is the way to do it. A DRM shouldn't PREVENT illegal behavior, just make it so that legal behavior is more convenient! This is exactly the theory that I preach in my journal ;) http://slashdot.org/~RingDev/journal/126947 [slashdot.org]

    -Rick

  • Indies (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Arandir ( 19206 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @04:06PM (#14600843) Homepage Journal
    What the difference between an indie developer and a publisher? At what point does one stop being a independent.

    p.s. One reason I ask is that a friend's rpg game company, with all of three employees, is not considered "indie", and thus finds their products frequently panned and derided on indie-oriented forums.
    • Apparently, you think you can somehow define the fickle taste of teenagers? Why care about such things?
    • I think if you're doing it for a living -- if you don't have a day job -- it's not considered "indie." If you're doing it indie, and you have a big hit, and then you quit your day job, well, then you still have your indie cred, for a few months I guess...

    • Some definitions (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Indie developer: A developer who creates a game with their own resources, as opposed to having development funded by a publisher. The developer thus has the independence to create any kind of game they desire, based on their preferences, market analysis, or artistic license, and are not at risk of being cancelled or forced to change their design by a third party publisher.

      Publisher: A company who distributes, markets, supports, and/or finances game development projects. Publishing can vary widely; some pu
    • I think the whole "indie" thing in music, comics, games etc follows a very simple rule:

      If you are unsuccessful at making money from games/music/comics, then you're indie.
      If you manage to make money in any real amount, then you're a souless corporate bastard who should be ridiculed and hated.

      In Stardock's case, they got the indie credit because their games were never considered AAA titles with tons of marketing and corporate push from the publisher... they also used publishers that were far from the top of t
    • This is the weakness of the "indie" subculture -- they view making money as some sort of moral weakness, and despite the fact that nearly all of them hold dreams of eventually making money themselves anyone who actually manages to ascend to that magic plane of profitability will have to do it with millions of people wrapped around their ankles trying to hold them back. Its also one of the reasons you so rarely see worthwhile product from people with pretensions of indieness. Give me a company like Stardoc
  • Ah yes! That's that company who've never received a penny from me or anybody I know, yet whose marvelous Windows skinning program seems to be somehow installed in full version mode on all our computers!
    They actually have a very interesting business plan: create decent minimalist software with a big focus on letting users create content for it, thus allowing for the creation of a hugely attractive library at no cost. It's very cool, and a sure sign of the effect of the internet on proprietary software.
    That

  • stardock ownz (Score:3, Interesting)

    by davez0r ( 717539 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @05:13PM (#14601580)
    i was just going to say that stardock makes galactic civilizations, which is awesome. i pirated it at first, but i liked it so much that i bought it.

    and i had no idea they had so many other products [stardock.com]

    yay to them.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:stardock ownz (Score:2, Interesting)

      by JediLow ( 831100 ) *
      Stardock is a pretty good company. I've been keeping up with the developers journals about GalCiv II and the amount of work that they've put into it to make something good is above and beyond what people do these days. Instead of the patch mentality that most companies have they're trying to get the game shipped in a finished state... which more companies really should follow.

      It also helps that their staff regularly reads the forums and answers questions...

    • Garsh -- lost in the sands of time. Not even a mention that Galactic Civilizations started out as an OS/2 operating system game? As did Object Desktop. OS/2 Warp with Object Desktop really rocked in the age of Win9X. Like driving a pimped up Caddie with heated seats and adjustable seat and steering wheel compared to a Jeep.

      Brad seems to be an interesting person who is often willing to ruminate on the computer biz. It's too bad he left a bit of a bad taste with the OS/2 crowd by laying down some heavy b
  • I remember them! I used to be addicted to WindowBlinds when I was still stuck with 98SE (the last version I ever owned). Although then again, these days I tend to prefer KDE mixed with Enlightenment myself...
    • I remember them. Object Desktop and Galactic Civilizations for OS/2. When I see Stardock I always remember my old OS/2 machine. Then I remember that damn single input queue on the otherwise nice (at the time) UI. One app would always hang the stupid UI.
  • It really is as easy to take their games from point A to point B as they advertise. I moved to Japan 2 years ago and the only game that came with me was GalCiv I, because they had associated my CD key with my email address and they let me download the entire thing over again (not a challenge for Japanese residential broadband ;) ). That was pretty nice when the cost of a PC game here is about $100 ($60 for *Starcraft*, for pete's sake). I was so impressed at my ability to get GalCiv working fine on a new

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