Indeed. I was a huge supporter of theirs until it was shown through Wardell's forum posts and other actions that they were not as pro-consumer as they acted. I think the one that broke the camel's back was Wardell going on a rant about how they deserve to control every aspect of their game after release and being pro-consumer doesn't mean being against DRM or company control over their products after purchase.

Impulse is terrible for reasons quite aside from my dislike of Stardock.

Brad Wardell
To those reviewing the game: I would urge you to review the game prior to v1.1. I say this because v1.05 (the release day version) is the version of the game that was originally released and if that version of the game is considered flawed then my view is that Stardock should suffer the consequences for that.
Demigod / Elemental
- beta tests checked
- unoptimized,half finished version checked
- crappy multiplayer at the start checked
- bugs,bugs,bugs checked
- big ideas, promises for a better version checked
- patches checked
- abandoned community Demigod checked , Elemental coming soon

I think it's fair to say that the Stardock fans started to think twice about Stardock's pro-consumer stance over the whole Demigod fiasco. Sure you will get people pointing the blame at GPG but at the end of the day they were only doing the job Stardock were paying them for. A game is supported as well and as long as it's supported by the publisher end of. If Stardock were serious about Demigod they would have paid GPG more to fix it and they didn't. The fans chalked it down to one blip on Stardock's record and waited patiently for Elemental and by all accounts the launch of Elemental was just as bad as Demigod.
Add to that Brad's rants and the fact Impulse is the most regionally restricted DD platform on the market and you can see why their support has slowly eroded away.

wait Brad said that?

http://forums.elementalgame.com/394104
7.

damn....
"Stardock is not just a game studio but it is also a publisher. What does this mean? Well, historically, the way it works is a game is released and if people don't like it, they're supposed to buy some expansion pack for it that "fixes" things that people thought should be in the original version. "
wait... I thought if a game was broken upon release the company 'fixes' said issues......... I know Bliz does this without expectations of more money ala sc2's 'fixes' for the gpu problem they had....
Also i do like the fact they are gonna send out a new disc (so long as i dont have to pay for it) cause my isp times out when i try to patch the game and ive really only played maybe 20 min of the game without crashes.

In Paradox style .

Who's anti-GOG? I DEFINITELY think they need to get their support section fixed, because that's clearly not working at the moment, and sorry but that isn't acceptable. If that's what you interpret as Anti-GOG, you need to stop being over-sensitive.
As for Stardock, Brad's latest post is actually shockingly positive. I'm somewhat astounded, because it seems that stepping away for a few days has FINALLY allowed him to see what a clusterfuck Elemental has been :
(I'm up north on vacation typing on an extremely slow connection so bear with me)
I don't think people yet fully realize the completeness of Stardock's fail on Elementa's launch.
I'm going to write more about this but not only did we think v1.05 was ready for everyone but we felt v1.0 was too. That's the level of disconnect/poor judgment on our part we're talking about.
If the game had come out in February, it would still have been a disastrous launch because lack of time wasn't the issue. It was blindness, sheer blindness. We felt the game was finished. And I speak of v1.0, not v1.05. Blindness.
There will be massive consequences for Stardock's game studio. I'll be talking more about this when I get back. But the game wasn't released early. The game was released poorly. Head in the sand syndrome imo. I've read the reviews as much as possible given my hideous internet access up here and I agree with them. We just didn't see what they were talking about. We thought any complaints would be about polish points or something.
The point is, the issue here is far far worse than many of you think it is. I wish it was an issue of the game being released too early. That's an easy thing for a company to "fix". Elemental's launch is the result of catastrophic poor judgment on my part.
EVERY competent software developer knows that the programmer must never be the one deciding whether the program is done. Yet, my love of Elemental broke my self discipline and I began coding on the game itself in vast amounts and lost any sense of objectivity on where the game's state was. I normally only program the AI on our games so I can keep a level of distance from the game itself to determine whether it's "Ready". On Elemental, I was in love with the world and the game and lost my impartiality.
We'll do better.

That's a good read... it almost reads like he might be putting someone else in charge of the day-to-day game making operations? I don't know...
Good to see them taking responsibility though.

I get the impression these days that Brad is either completely and utterly bi-polar or more than one person is posting from that account. Either way, as with anything Stardock/Impulse these days, I'll believe it when I see it.
Now for a completely unrelated rant, excuse me while I curse out Valve/2K again for fucking us over with Mafia 2 and their "the release date for Japan has not been decided" crock of an excuse for taking peoples money for months on end again without giving us a product to show for it.
They should try that BS stunt in the US and see how far it gets them. Cunts.

http://forums.impulsedriven.com/394855/page/4/#2753375
I can sympathize with some of what he has written being a software developer myself. I guess love for the game he made, pride, and tremendous amounts of stress could have made him act like a jackass. Does anybody know if Brad had those temper tantrums on the forums before Elemental was announced? If you read some post below his last one there is a guy saying that Brad banned him from posting in the Elemental forums for actually doing what all beta testers should have done so maybe he IS a jackass.

I'll say this for him: he's talking the talk by taking responsibility for this mess. I'm betting he'll walk the walk as well and Stardock will come out with a good product and they'll make good for their fans. I'm also betting they'll lose a lot of game customers over this one though, as well.

I've seen mentions of him acting the same in the past (prior to any mention of elemental), yes.