I haven’t installed it, but Impulse looks like it could be a decent alternative. Steam seems to be leading (vastly) in terms of available titles though. Perhaps this can be credited to Steam being the only way to play games such as Half-Life 2 on PC.
What other alternatives exist for buying games digitally? Has anyone tried Direct 2 Drive?
I’m surprised Microsoft hasn’t come up with an alternative to Steam (for Vista).
Impulse is better in various ways, mainly as being only a distribution platform, so it’s not required to run the games, you could even uninstall it and still have your installed games available. Of course, having it does give you access to Steam-like features like an easy way to get game updates and what not.
Since Stardock started distributing their own software in such ways, it’s reasonable they don’t have an audience as large as Steam which started with the likes of Half-Life and Counter-Strike, as opposed to Stardock’s niche 4X strategy games like Galactic Civilizations, but it’s growing steadily also.
Another good one coming up is gog.com Good old Games by the same company that created The Witcher RPG, it’ll have mostly older titles, with no DRM whatsoever, and so I assume is also not required to run when playing the games, I haven’t tried it yet.
And Phantom just resurfaced as a similar web-based platform, but I wouldn’t begin recommending it before they take major steps to prove their worth, heh.
I also mostly trust independent developers’ distribution methods. Not really reliable I guess, but again there’s no client to run so you can just back up the games you download yourself and have no worries for future availability of the platform. Most use Plimus but I guess none fit in this category as they’re really closer to simple http downloads validated by credit card than an actual platform or portal. I’m just saying, Steam-backed or not, people are getting more convenient with online purchases all the time. In the end, Steam and such platforms might just be the equivalents of GameStop and other big retail chains, while games are available everywhere else also, including the developers’ or publishers’ own websites and what not, as Atari are doing lately, and EA too I believe.
I’m not quite sure what you mean by Impulse being “only a distribution platform”. Is this not the same with Steam as well? You can add shortcuts to games that you’ve purchased from other sources to the Steam client as well.
Or, do you mean that Impluse is only required to download the games and not play them (no DRM in the games themselves)?
The latter, yes. You just use it to get the game and/OR update it, then the game is completely stand alone. That’s independent to DRM though. While Stardock’s own games have none so far, other companies still use their own DRM, for example SecuRom, just as they do on Steam sometimes. But that doesn’t mean they require Impulse to run.
Makes sense now. Sounds like a smart move on Stardock’s part.
DRM isn’t killing PC gaming, decent PC games just don’t happen that often 
Microsoft are too slow to catch onto these types of things. Their closest thing to digital distribution is probably Xbox Live, though that’s mainly limited to videos, demos and old-school games.
Which is a great shame.
I just wonder if people will be put off from buying PC games due to the complexity involved in installing and running the game due to DRM. GTA4, for example, uses three types of DRM if you buy it over Steam (Steam, Games for Windows, and Rockstar’s own system I believe - haven’t actually installed it myself though).