Q&A: Stardock’s Wardell Talks Distribution Revolution With Impulse

Do you have any research besides your success that suggests that supporting the game after release does increase its sales?

BW: It would be so hard to do a truly scientific study on that, but I think common sense says it does. First of all, every time you do an update, you get some media coverage of it, so that’s almost like free advertising.

Two, some number greater than zero of people who want to pirate it who don’t want to go through the trouble of trying to find yet another update are going to buy it. So it’s certainly not going to cost you sales. Therefore, it has to increase sales.

I’m just thinking about the cost of developing the update.

BW: It doesn’t cost very much. Like on Demigod, we’re going to do a full year of updates for that, too. Gas Powered Games has converted over to the way we’re doing things.

When you’re doing the budgets for your game, you know this far out for a game that’s not coming out for a year that you’re going to do a full year of updates for Demigod. How does that affect the budget? Do you decrease the budget for the initial product, instead having a full budget over the course of the product’s lifespan which includes all the updates?

BW: We just increase the budget overall. So the main game doesn’t lose anything. You just add a little bit on the back, and you’re going to make it up in extra sales.

That’s really interesting, because it sounds so counter to the mercenary way that a lot of things in the game industry are run.

BW: Yeah, but everyone says that the PC game industry is dying. Maybe they should change course.