I own the game, very fun but shallow in lategame. The dev of the game actually worked on the Spacebuild Enhancement pack used for the Spacebuild 3 GMOD modification. I think he's worth supporting but I bought the game through Impulse so I'm left out to dry since I won't be able to re-download it later likely knowing Gamestop. About the game itself:

Spacebuild made you gather resources to turn into fuel or power, store it on a ship you build in GMOD, and make ships that are operational and added stuff like atmosphere and terraforming stuff for planets.

This transfers into this game as a 4x space strategy with the most customizable ships possible. I mean you can literally make any ship for any job, make a ship pack tons of tiny guns so it has a better chance of hitting fighters or make it pack one big gun for the highest amount of armor penetration and damage (small guns can just bounce off albative armor) and then do you go energy weapons or railguns? Missiles or torpedoes?

Ship customization aside there is also scale. You can make scale .001 to scale 10,000 ships, though the most feasible sizes are between 1 and 50 and 100 is typically an all in one fleet. You can make a scale 100 with a bunch of .25 sized guns and for that ship each gun is like a giant cannon for a size 25 scale ship. Complicated but easy to get a hang of in 1 hour, you can sacrifice armor or weaponry for all out speed and harassment or go slow for a defensive ship.

The game also has newtonian physics, ships accelerate half a straight trip then turn around to decelerate the other half. What determines how fast a ship is really comes down to acceleration. Faster a ship can get to speed and slow down, the quicker it can turn, maneuver, and travel. But bigger engines use more fuel, and more fuel needed to keep going takes more space to store on a ship. It's fun to try things out, multi-barreled modified railguns mixed with missiles on a fast ship or carriers that pack corvettes double the size of a fighter around. Do what you fancy, no real right or wrong way to play unless you absolutely lose.

There is finally a functional AI for singleplayer on hard and above, below is a handicapped type AI. Multi is where it is at, just remember though that designing a ship takes 20 minutes on average for me as I think things out on prototypes, so save your ship blueprints and use them in multi so you won't lose to a guy who has his blueprints pre-fab from singleplayer. I give this game a 7.5/10, a few things need to be tweaked and balanced but it's fine otherwise.

Aren't Stardock the ones that made that hard-to-use desktop theme system?

IMHO the game that offered best customization so far was space empires 4, you should check it out if you still haven't, not great looking but ripe with that "one more turn" addictive element ;)
On to the thread - I am a long time user of steam and am browsing for alternate digital distribution platforms. So far, GOG is the best with it's no DRM policy so I think I start building my old games collection here ;)
Unfortunately, i think it's in the nature of capitalism for small businesses to be "eaten" by large companies the moment they become profitable and start filling some purpose in the "grand plan" some large company has for its expansion, just look at all the acquisitions on the IT market, google and Intel making baffling choices buying companies that turn to be something critical for their expansion into new tech later on. Main thing is, if all these mergers leave companies unchanged and they keep serving their customers and treat devs the way they did before then all is well, nothing has changed except the man who writes their paycheck at the end of the month. If the said company is disbanded on the other way and start exibiting the negative business principles of some company that acquires it, then it's time to abandon it and go elsewhere like the devs of star ruler did. Only, it would be fair to give them the benefit of the doubt and see if they would behave in a certain neferious way before they go away. Me being for Europe, I don't get the hatred aimed at gamestop but I guess there are reasons for that since so many people hate them.

http://www.soldak.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3634

http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/?p=1111

http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,8520.0.html

The developer of Light of Altair changed my Impulse key to Steam key today .

Score 1 for Steam, lol

You have to write an email to the developer and ask them to change your Impulse key to Steam key .

Huh, Impulse was number two for sales for Arcen Games... that's interesting.

Doesn't matter much to me, didn't own any impulse games yet. Was waiting for a good sale on the Stardock games/applications, but I guess I don't need Impulse for that anymore soon. :)

Interesting :

http://impulsedriven.com/witcher2
http://www.impulsedriven.com/ddefenders

These games disappeared from the "coming soon " list , and you can't pre-order them .

Well, DD is pretty much vapor ware for all intents and purposes. It's looking less and less likely that the PC version will ever see the light of day, so removing that from sale may have nothing to do with GameStop. Unless you can find a statement by TE concerning DD on Impulse, I wouldn't base an conclusions on that title alone.

Pretty much what I would expect them to say really. They are way to new in the business to already start burning bridges. The need for cash can always override principles. To be fair most indies are adopting a wait and see attitude.

It's the outstanding pre-orders that interest me. Did Impulse refund everyone then, or...?

Well according to Impulse and Zoomba that first charge is supposed to drop off your credit card in a few days and i'm sure it does work like in the US. In my experience however it stayed and I was effectively charged twice.