Stardock nettles gaming industry

THE MOVE towards providing online content delivery in the games industry shuffled forward a small step today.

Stardock Entertainment, a small indie publisher with games such as Galactic Civilizations and The Political Machine to its credit, opening up its TotalGaming.net services' second phase.

In a system bearing more than a passing resemblance to Valve's Steam CDS (Content Delivery System) games can be purchased on the website and downloaded through the existing StarDock Central program.

An interesting thing about this system is that Stardock are bypassing Digital Rights Management and allowing users to burn their purchases onto CD's - something that should keep backup-rights activists happy.

"As game developers, we are intimately familiar with software piracy," said Brad Wardell, President & CEO of Stardock. "Over the years, we have concluded that the best way to combat piracy is to reward your customers with greater value. Our system makes it more convenient to play by the rules than to pirate the games."

Well we certainly hope he's right or else Stardock could be down a bit of money, though other publishers and developers seem to have seen the logic in their argument with publishers such as Ubisoft, Take 2 and Strategy First all plying some of their wares on TotalGaming.

As well as the mainstream big boys chipping in TotalGaming aims to attract a lot of independent game developers for whom web distribution is oftentimes the best route to go down.

"We have two distinct goals for TotalGaming.net," said Brian Clair, Director of TotalGaming.net at Stardock. “First, we want to provide a proven electronic distribution channel for publishers who want to leverage their classic game assets. Second, we want to provide an outlet to independent game developers to get their games out there.”

In addition to having titles developed by Stardock such as Galactic Civilizations, The Political Machine, LightWeight Ninja, and others, other offerings such as Robin Hood, O-R-B, and Disciples II: Ultimate Edition are also available. Independent games such as Chronic Logic's Gish, BreakQuest by Nurium, Jets'n'Guns by Rake in Grass, Astral Masters by Apus Software, Xeno Assault II by Jagged Blade Software and more have been added as well.

Users can either buy games individually for between $5-$50 or pay for a TotalGaming.net membership which provides them with tokens that can be used buy the available titles at a discounted rate. µ