Galactic Civilizations is one of my guilty pleasures. Part Master of Orion, part Spaceward Ho!, the game and its sequel eat up any free time I can spare when I’m not playing games for review. Their upcoming title Sins of a Solar Empire may even unseat those games soon. Gamasutra features an indepth and interesting interview with Stardock CEO Brad Wardell about the past of the software development company, its origins as an OS/2 program developer and its TotalGaming.net online game service.
One of the more interesting questions relates to the TotalGaming.net initiative, citing where the service came from and where Wardell sees it going.
The next phase for TotalGaming.net is for it to get more of its own brand. Right now, a user buys a game from TotalGaming.net and then uses Stardock Central to manage the purchase. There are some branding issues with that. The next generation will give players a TotalGaming.net client that lets people seamlessly get updates, buy new games, etc.
I’d like to even see it be able to support users who didn’t buy the game from us. For example, if someone buys game X at the store, we want to make sure they can get their updates seamlessly through TotalGaming.net. We already have this working on our games: you can buy GalCiv II in a store in, say, Italy and still use TotalGaming.net â$” for free â$” to download the entire game from us as long as you have the serial number.
Wardell also discusses the surprise reaction the company had to the overall success of Galactic Civilization II and its expansion as well as teasing a little bit of information about an upcoming thtle that will make fans of the Microprose classic Master of Magic.
You can check out the full interview here.
Leave a Reply
By submitting a comment here you grant GameFront a perpetual license to reproduce your words and name/web site in attribution. Inappropriate or irrelevant comments will be removed at an admin's discretion.