Today Stardock and Gas Powered Games announced their partnership to develop and publish the much anticipated PC strategy/RPG game Demigod. Demigod is going to be a milestone PC game for a lot of reasons that will be made clear in the coming months.

What Gas Powered Games and Stardock are doing is not your typical publishing agreement. Just as Stardock and Ironclad teamed up in an unprecedented way on Sins of a Solar Empire, the three of us are teaming up in ways that, to my knowledge, have never been done before by independent developers in the game industry.

For example, Stardock, Gas Powered Games, and Ironclad are teaming up to build a unified multiplayer architecture. For years, PC gamers have struggled to get multiplayer games going. And then, even when they get these games up, the on-line experience can be, how shall we say, less than ideal at times.  With our experiences in this area, we are collaborating on a multiplayer architecture that will make the PC strategy game experience much more enjoyable.

The first step of this will find its way into Impulse.  Impulse will allow users to browse through available multiplayer strategy games.  A player who has Demigod, The Political Machine, and Sins of a Solar Empire would, for instance, be able to see the available games for all 3 and join with Impulse launching the corresponding game automatically.  Moreover, all three games will share an existing account which will have ranking data, achievements, friends lists, kindreds (we'll talk more about this soon), and much more. 

From this start, we intend to allow others to make use of this architecture so that eventually, multiplayer gaming for strategy gamers is a seamless, easy to use, and enjoyable experience. 

And this is just the start. Over the coming year, the 3 indies teamed up will be delivering content and features to PC gamers that we hope you find worthwhile.