I'm very cynical about that one. It's a game more suited to console than PC, came out later on PC (by I think 2 weeks but enough time to have impatient people buy on console), is frankly nothing special and is going to be pirated anyway. It just seems like it's something set up to fail in order to justify their existing position that all consumers are evil thieves who only part with money if it's dragged from their cold dead fingers.
I can quite easily imagine them saying "We GAVE you the no DRM option and you pirated it anyway you greedy pricks, so much for your excuses. Now we're not only going to develop shitty games exclusively for consoles but we're going to make all of you phone just one bloke we've got in bangladesh and, once you finally get off hold, beg him for permission to play the game."
I'd love to be wrong but it's a pretty rare event.

I jumped on the steam bandwagon in 2k4, and in this amount of time, that was not the case, I can't speak for before then though.

I think he is probably thinking of GameTap, which still prevents your from doing things like running mods on games that are played through its game browser.

I love Stardock, but I've been downloading stuff from them (GalCiv 2: Twilight of the Arnor and multiple patches/extras involved in that game and the other expansions) since before there even was an Impulse, and can confirm that whether you download through Stardock's earlier app directly (you still can, on some games at least) or through Impulse, errors, unexplained stoppages, and slowdowns are extremely common.
Additionally, Impulse seems buggier than the old program in one way at least. I have Sins of a Solar Empire, and I have not been able to download the latest patch. It's been out a while and I have tried many times. It starts up and pretty quickly stops. When their old app would do that, at least none of my screens would say that I was up to date. Not so with Impulse.
I downloaded Dawn of War: Dark Crusade last night. Quite slow. But Impulse at least wasn't buggy this time. Tell the truth, most of the downloads I've had with Stardock's earlier app or with Impulse haven't gone through the first time.
On another note, I am no fan of the strong stance Stardock takes publicly about not having DRM, but then allowing games on its distribution system with DRM -- but without letting anyone know about the DRM. It is quite misleading to come to one of the most publicized makers and distributors of DRM-free games to find yourself downloading a game with DRM. Especially since a download = an install automatically. If you find out a game has DRM on it, who knows if you can do anything about it once the download begins. Pretty lame.
All that said, I still like Stardock a lot and will continue to support them and use Impulse (very selectively from now on). To tell the truth, I was very iffy about buying Sins of a Solar Empire and would never have bought it if it were not sold by a company I explicitly wanted to support. I wouldn't be surprised at all if a great many people did the same.

It's not that bad.

It is worse than that bad. Name a service that is slower.

D2D.

Australia Post?
Only postal service to be outrun by continental drift...

AliasAlpha, I don't think Ubisoft can take that stance, as PoP is showing low piracy numbers from what I've read. That's not to say it hasn't been pirated because it most certainly has, but I don't think Ubi can make a case that it has an exceptionally high piracy rate due to no DRM.
Blarg: as far as I'm aware, any titles available on Impulse that have DRM (other than Impulse's inherent DRM scheme) have it listed on the game purchase page. Is this not the case? And if not, can you point out some of the titles that don't list it?

Yeah, that one. Thanks.

I guess I'm the only one without problems using Impulse, the only slowness I ever receive is running the program after awhile of not using it. I run all my Impulse games without even starting it.

The only reason why I use Impulse is because some of their games can be gotten really cheaply, like Space Rangers 2. I agree that Impulse is really crappy, but there's no reason for me to whine about slow installation and archiving speeds, because come on, at $3.99, the game's enough of a steal to look past the flaws of Impulse

wrong. its in the top ten list of all the top torrent sites.
as i look right now, there are 20 thousand leechers and about 8k seeds.. thats just on one site.

links?

quick browse revealed number of torrents with at most hundreds of seeds and couple thousand+ leeches but most of these are torrent sites that use multitracker feature (adding numerous other trackers to their torrents) thus artificially bloating their own seed/peer ratios so getting accurate estimates is nearly impossible.
Also I found few torrent search engines that claimed the torrents having thousands of seeds and over ten thousand leechers but going to the torrent only revealed above numbers so either the numbers are outdated or they are just sponsored torrent trackers. I'd wager the later as it's highly unlikely that these less known trackers could surpass ratios of the most popular trackers.