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.