Glad to hear that there are still plans for Sins of a Solar Empire.

Also, WOOT, Elemental: Fallen Enchantress!

First - Congratulations on another year of business.    An interesting read, as it was last year.  It makes me excited to see Society and E:FE coming around, and the idea of the competition with Steamworks heating up makes me grin.

It is interesting to see that Impulse has become more profitable than the Software side of things.  Did profits from Object Dock (and friends) stay about the same as last year?

Some comments/questions of my own on this report:

Why was Impulse limited to 3 titles per week at the Start?  Manning or bandwidth issues?

BTW, continue the emphasis on Indie games with Impulse- it's seriously awesome- and smart.

Also, why did you consider the SDK not ready?  I really though the integration of Elemental and Impulse was done very, very well, and was a bright spot for Elemental.

You really need to raise that 3% female rate for Impulse users.  I'd recommend being accessible to some of the girl gaming sites and reach out to them.  Might get some good ideas.   Indie games might help here.

That's a very down-to-earthy report.  Nice aesthetics, too.   Certainly a lot less straining to read than most earnings releases, financial reports, etc. I read from the public companies, which tend to contain a lot of legalese and jargon.

Looks like Stardock took my advice on re-releasing Elemental, so as to get a new set of reviews.  That makes sense.  Once your game gets reviewed, that's your review.  That's just how the de facto system works.  There's fair ways to play the system and unfair ways.  This is a fair one.

Good news on the Sins announcement (although I guess it depends on what it is...).  I kind of skipped over Diplomacy.  I paid for it, played the beta...but then never touched it again.   Entrenchment consumed the better part of Christmas break for me a couple years back.

I am excited to see that Stardock is still committed to a client-free PC gaming platform. I look forward to the public release of Reactor!

I thought that Ironclad didn't want to do another Sins game. I wonder what the announcement is going to be then?

Thanks for the customer report. Much appreciated. ^^

Nice looking picture from EFE! 

That wurm looks bad ass.

Congratulations on another year of business. May Stardock rise to meet the challenges of 2011.

I think just getting a deal with Her Interactive (Nancy Drew games), get more of the CSI type games and get the "Myst" type games (there are still a ton) would help increase the female users quite a bit I think.  I'm pigeon holing those games as "female" but let's be honest here.  My wife is disappointed every time a new Nancy Drew game comes out and still not on Impulse.

I can wait.  I'm sure even once it's been finalized it'll still take a while to see much in the way of games coming out with it.  Still, I would like to see it used.

At the moment I prefer Steam just based on lack of need to detect/patch, but I'm glad Impulse is doing well regardless.

Excellent report! I genuinely found it interesting. Here are my comments:

• While I agree with the report's assessment regarding piracy, reports like this one can only fuel company decision-makers' confirmation biases (assuming they actually have such biases).
• Frankly, I'm surprised more companies haven't subscribed to your Gamer's Bill of Rights. It's the heart and soul of Stardock's commercial and consumer success IMO, and I believe it shows in multiple ways.
• Honestly, given how you basically said during what was the final stage of the E:WOM beta "The game will ship in 90 days, therefore we'll just be fixing stuff and not be adding anything in unless it's absolutely necessary." simply shocked me. Having followed the betas for Stardock's Galactic Civilizations 2 games, I don't remember having such a purposely-rushed portion of the beta. Those betas were run under the "It's done when it's done" mentality; when the last part of the E:WOM beta came up, it clearly read "We have a deadline to meet, and we're going to meet it 'cuz we have to." (I suppose that's why Fallen Enchantress will be digital-only.) Frankly, I think the latter mentality is what killed the success for E:WOM; it got rushed, and as the Metacritic scores and hoards of disappointed consumer reviews demonstrate that it shows.

I wonder what you guys are going to announce... I really want to know... jerks.

My guess is tools. When stuff is new, things tend to be done manually. If Impulse only has to get a couple games a week up, you don't need a lot of automation to do it. But it would take a lot of people to scale up a manual process.

They probably invested in automation tools to require less human interaction to get games ready to go up.

Great read, thanks!

I particularly enjoyed the compiled statistics from the customer survey; I was surprised to see that Impulse users favored Android phones over iPhones. I guess the openness and edginess tends to attract more elite computer users, like developers/enthusiasts. I'm curious to know how many others here are programmers or techies of some kind.

One thing I'm wondering is how Stardock plans to promote the Gamer's Bill of Rights to bigger companies, like Ubisoft, whose DRM flies in the face of a number of the principles? Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I could buy Settlers 7 on Impulse (it's favorite distribution platform when I have a choice) but the game requires you to register with Ubisoft and be connected to the Internet while playing. Is it just a matter of waiting until gamers get so fed up that Ubisoft starts losing money, and is forced to adopt some sort of ethical policy?

Not seen a chairman's letter that informative and frank since the last time I read Warren Buffet's.