With more and more software; whether it is games or the more standard desktop applications, being made available via the web way to distribute them easily and also for buyers to pay for easily is becoming more and more important. One of the most well known of these digital distribution systems is Valve’s Steam system for game distribution that is gaining real traction. However not everyone is a gamer and instead would like for a similar type of thing for regular software.

Enter Impulse by Stardock.

Now I am a big fan of the Stardock suite of programs having been a user of their Object Desktop suite until my subscription ran out recently. I personally wouldn’t want to be without their WindowBlinds program but they are a lot more than that as well and up until the release of Impulse their program line up was available as well via their Stardock Central distribution application which was the predecessor to Impulse.

With Impulse however they have updated from their SCD application and at the same time have opened it up to all developers of games and other types of software. As they said in the press release on June 17 2008

"Impulse is a platform first, a store second," said Brad Wardell, president and CEO of Stardock Corp. "Our primary objective with Impulse is to address the issues users have with their Windows experience today. That includes being able to boot up a new PC, install Impulse, and then be able to press a button and have it install all of your software and games with one click."

To this end, Stardock has been working with major PC game publishers and software developers to bring as many titles onto Impulse over the next several months. For developers and publishers, Impulse supports localized currencies, custom pricing models for affiliates, exclusive store items on a per-partner basis, publisher controlled availability, and more. For consumers, Impulse is expected to have the largest selection of digitally-available software on the market within its first year of operation. Currently Impulse features more than 100 games and software applications.

Of course being the cranky old fart that I am the first thing I did was to check out what payment methods were supported and much to my delight as with all Stardock products they have support for PayPal. For me this is always a deal clincher as that is the only way I pay for what I want online so I was really happy to see this. I know for me that when I go looking for software to buy know I’ll be checking the Impulse site to see if what I want is available and if it is they’ll be getting my money.

While they are still filling out their line of software from other companies being made available you can see from the screenshot that Corel has already jumped on board so here’s hoping more and more will do the same.

Now to go and install their client and check out what I can add to my list of software to buy.

Conversation Tags: Stardock, Impulse, digital distribution