Acting on Impulse

Well, achievements are just one avenue in rewarding the player. There are so many opportunities, but they can only exist once all this stuff is implemented in a game. One of the problems with the existing platforms is that they either try to inject themselves into your experience - Games for Windows Live, for example. I'm in my war game, and all of a sudden you see this thing pop-up, which takes out of your experience.

In order for the user to enjoy the extra-game capabilities to really take off it needs to become more integrated with the game. Achievements just happen to be the easiest thing - but we can go so much further than that. You might play a shooter - play long enough and you could get extra weapons, and different games should have the flexibility to reward or encourage their players in different ways.

But that can be expensive to do, so what we're hoping to do with Impulse Reactor is that because the client is integrated into the game, it's not some external client we're calling, or importing source code, we can incorporate DLC and all kinds of interesting virtual storage features that the developer can make use of.

As a result it allows the developers, and their creativity and knowledge of their own game, to come up with less generic methods of rewarding. The reason why achievements are popular is because they're generic, and so easy to implement. The solution to that is to provide developers with the tools to make less generic reward systems.

I think that if each game is a little different... In Starcraft II, rankings obviously matter, but if I'm playing a roleplaying game, just because somebody has gone around and completed all the 'rats-in-the-basement' quests, that doesn't mean he deserves a better ranking than me. Every developer probably has their own idea on how to reward their players - and as developers who are trying provide platforms to the market, I think it's our job to make sure they can think of unique ways to reward their customers and make them glad they purchased that game.

There's a lot of talk about piracy in the last few years - well, piracy happens because the incentive to purchase a game is insufficient for some of those people who do pirate but could have bought it. Elemental's copy-protection scheme, through Impulse Reactor, means that people who bought the game will keep getting this free content, right into the game itself - not even having to leave the game and go download it from somewhere else.

That's not something we could have done before - we'd needed to have released a patch.

Well, it's up to the marketing to make it clear as to what the game does, but in terms of what's in the game, one of your tabs can literally be called "Free Stuff" which lights up - but if you didn't buy the game, you won't get access to it.