How Impulse hopes to challenge Steam

[TBR]

If they can get themselves well integrated with facebook, and become the facebook platforms for games, it'll accomplish two things:

Firstly, every man and his dog has played a facebook game before. farmville, mafia wars, etc. If Impulse can get in to bed with those guys, they've got a huge platform to jump off.

Secondly, they then have the target audience for EPICLY CASUAL games that makes the wii look like a poor loner. And they'll have exclusive rights to it. Think popcap, more more popular and even more casual.

 

[Lord Kofun]

I can't figure this move out. It seems so... off. Facebook has a huge game base. That cannot be denied. The only trouble is that Steam and Facebook (since Impulse would be springboarding off of them, I consider it an [if A=B, and B=C, then A=C]) cannot be compared in the first place. Steam requires big downloads, has a massively versatile engine, and more or less owns the hardcore gaming crowd. After all, Counterstrike, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress, and various war game sects all exist on Steam. While on the other side, Facebook relies primarily on Java-script and all those web-based designs, with little to no downloads but are grotesquely simple as a result. So I imagine Impulse could finally give Steam some competition... in the same way Nintendo gives Sony and Microsoft competition now.