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The sad tale of Stardock -> Impulse -> Gamestop -> Nothing

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The sad tale of Stardock -> Impulse -> Gamestop -> Nothing

A story of how the games you buy disappear in a puff of smoke

from Stardock.net Forums

Many, many years ago, I bought some games via the "Stardock service" - Galciv2, I think, Elemental, then it became "Impulse" store, I bought some more games, notably Sword of the Stars, and Divinity 2, and then it was all sold to Gamestop. I did not like Gamestop one bit, but okay, at least I could still download the games. 

But this year, after fresh Win 10 reinstall, I wanted to redownload Gamestop client and download Sword of the Stars which I liked a lot, only to find out that the Gamestop website is gone, the client is gone, the whole company is probably out of business, and my "ownership" of said games probably null and void. 

It's a very good lesson learned - steam games, or any other "online" provided games can disappear any day, for any reason, and online services taken as granted can be denied for whatever reason. Only what is in your local storage, or on install files like those from GOG without strings attached counts. 

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Reply #26 from Stardock Forums Top

DKane is right that those two halves do not go the same way, and the reason is worth naming because it changes what you do about it.

A store account is an obligation somebody has to keep paying to honour. Records, servers, support when it goes wrong. It costs money every year it stays up, and when a store changes hands that obligation is the part that gets negotiated down. An installer and a key sitting on your own disk cost the issuer nothing once you have taken the download. So the entitlement is the fragile half and the bits are the durable half, and that holds whoever made the game.

Which is why I would not take "check the dashboard" as the lesson from rockdawg's post. The lesson is to pull down anything you would be annoyed to lose, now, while the thing that honours the record is still standing. That it was still there to pull is the lucky part, not the repeatable part.

I was not buying from Impulse, so I have no stake in the original complaint, and I have no figures on how much of that catalogue is still recoverable. I doubt anyone here does. The direction it moves in is not really in question though.

Reply #27 from Stardock Forums Top

Pulling down anything you would be annoyed to lose is decent advice up to a point, and I am that point. I have a folder of installers going back years, saved precisely because somebody once told me to save them, and a good number are for operating systems I no longer run and hardware I no longer own. They are perfectly safe. They are also useless, which was not quite the deal.

What actually survived from that era on this machine is GalCiv II, and not because I was organised. It survived because it is small, it asks very little of the machine, and nothing in it needs permission from a server that has since stopped existing. That is luck about what the software wants, not good practice on my part.

So I would rank the halves differently to Westbrook. Keeping the file matters, but what decides whether you still have a game in ten years is how much of the outside world it needs before it will start. The ones that had to phone somebody went first.

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