Impulse, The Rival That Could Have Been
GameStop once bet against buying games online. Former Stardock business developer Larry Kuperman says company leadership believed digital distribution was a "passing phase" and that physical retail would roar back. That belief helped doom Impulse, a once-promising PC storefront GameStop acquired in 2011—and shut down three years later.
Before GameStop entered the picture, Stardock had built a digital store called Drengin that later became Impulse. It launched in June 2008, right as Valve’s Steam started gaining traction beyond Valve’s own titles. In those years, Steam was growing but hardly the monolith it is now; the big shift didn’t kick in until marquee PC releases like BioShock and Team Fortress 2 put major weight behind the platform. For a brief window, gaming sites even listed Steam and Impulse as side-by-side options for buying PC games.
Publishers took notice. According to Kuperman, the major players were on board with Impulse, turning it into a credible rival candidate. By 2011, GameStop bought the store and hired Kuperman to keep building it. On paper, the retailer had a clear bridge to a digital future at the exact moment the PC market was pivoting away from discs.
“A Passing Phase”: Inside GameStop’s Thinking
That bridge never got used. Speaking at GDC this year—reported by PC Gamer—Kuperman recalled that inside GameStop, Impulse wasn’t taken seriously. When the company made him head of electronic distribution, he thought, "I thought that was going to be my forever job." Instead, leadership insisted the company’s physical footprint would carry it forward. As Kuperman put it, GameStop believed "electronic distribution was just a passing phase, and brick and mortar was going to come back strong." He even joked about the mindset as, "I’ve seen the future, it looks just like the 1950s."
Rather than scaling up Impulse to compete, GameStop kept its focus on stores. The strategic messaging, per Kuperman, treated digital as a detour rather than the road ahead. That stance was especially striking given that Impulse already stocked much of the same catalog as Steam and had publisher support—exactly the ingredients a retailer would need to stay relevant as customers shifted online.
Shutdown And Aftermath
By April 2014, GameStop closed Impulse entirely. The store vanished, and customers who’d bought games there haven’t been able to access those purchases for years—"over seven years," Kuperman noted of the long tail. While Steam kept growing, GameStop’s digital experiment ended without a replacement, leaving the company with fewer ways to reach PC players who had moved past boxed copies.
It’s a stark contrast with what followed at the retailer. Instead of building out a competitive digital platform, GameStop leaned into collectibles and secondhand goods. Today it’s as much about pre-owned toys and trading cards as anything else, with critiques over pricing on items like Pokémon cards popping up alongside the business pivot.
Where That Bet Led
How did the brick-and-mortar bet pan out? Not well. Since 2024, GameStop has closed over 1,300 stores, including 727 in 2025 and hundreds more in January this year. The chain still exists, but the years-long shift toward downloading and streaming games left its original model with less room to breathe.
Kuperman emphasized that this was "completely different management" than the team running GameStop today. Even so, the misread on digital distribution lingers as a cautionary tale. With Impulse in hand back in 2011, GameStop had a real shot to be the number two PC storefront. Instead, it treated the future like a fad and watched that window close. Whether the company can chart a new path now is an open question, but rebuilding a credible digital store from scratch—after shuttering the one it owned—looks like the hardest route of all.
