I wonder how this is going to work when I buy a game from the cheapest vendor, then download it from the fastest. Wouldn't the second party be a bit pissed they have to pay for bandwidth they didn't get paid for?

But this hasn't happened yet with any publishers that have games on Impulse. They never let you have retail keys, or keys from any other service. It's backwards even, they didn't *want* you to, so you the distributor took the initiative and they are the ones who weren't interested.

How can Goo change that?

Is StarDock going to Goo-ify their existing catalogue?

"Answer: Market forces.

Basically, what I predict will happen is that part of every publisher agreement will be that digital distributors must support ALL their customers regardless of where it was purchased. "

I was set to rubbish this idea but on reflection that would actually work. I bemoan the fact I can't get certain games on Steam, as an example, but eg Impulse does have them. When Steam and Impulse have different rosters and DRM (call it what you will) schemes I'm going to have a preferred supplier - the one that makes my life easiest. If a major digital distributor boycotts a game, the way the bricks and mortar suppliers have done (eg the DOW2 kerfuffle), but the rest are carrying it with a ubiquitous DRM policy then I'm not going to feel bad downloading from one of them if the experience is generally uniform.

Getting that level of agreement is going to be tough though. I thought this GOO thing was a wind-up but this post actually makes a lot of sense.

Waitaminute (I still can't edit my posts on here) I've thought of a flaw.

I can set up a storefront offering my ubiquitous download for a dollar less than everyone else but put no money towards my infrastructure. FG is suggesting that my lower price should encourage the better equipped stores to lower their prices to match my price but that's just hurting the people who invest in servers. Once word gets out that you can buy from my cheapass store but download from a real merchant with impunity then I'm going to unjustly funnel off sales at the expense of somebody else's bandwidth. All I'm doing is forcing people to cut their margins. Or did you have another interpretation of market forces?

DD prices are almost always specified by the publisher, not the shop. So you'd have to work out a contract with the publisher to let you do that in the first place, and i doubt they're going to let you run a price lower than the others if you don't have any infrastructure.

Wait, so if authentification is all on the publisher, why is Reactor bundled with the game exe in an encryted format?  What features are added in that encrypted exe taht are not part of the original game?

I don't know how much I waited for this. Customers must have back the power that slowly was drained from them. With this Goo thing customer can choose at any times which service of which provider he want based on how good the service is. That's the only way to make provider wishing to improve their service. Otherwise a not so good provider with unfair methods that has gained the biggest catalogue in a filthy way could possibily rule the world of DD without improve itself, and that's would be bad for the custormers.