So what's going on at Stardock these days?  The answer is, LOTS of stuff. Where should I start?

I guess first, you're going to notice that we're going to start branding things to simplify what part of the company you're working with:

1. My Games. For Stardock's million+ gamers.
2. My Desktop. For the millions of people who use Stardock's desktop experience software.
3. My Tools. For the growing user base of next-generation utility software programs.
4. My Community. For users of Stardock sites like WinCustomize.com or JoeUser.com.

General Projects

The biggest internal project right now is Impulse.  It is designed to finally pool together all of Stardock's content, software, games, and other strengths into a single package.  For the past couple of years, we've had a program called Stardock Central which was really just designed as a quick and easy way to digitally distribute our own stuff. But we see the future as being a place where people can buy software, games, and other digital content from us as well. We have this immense infrastructure in place to do digital distribution that seems very popular with users. With our TotalGaming.net service, we've dabbled with distributing third-party stuff.  Impulse takes us to the next step.

The goal with Impulse is to let users and producers get together and easily purchase and manage their software, games and other content.

Impulse will go into a preview beta probably next week.

My Games

Stardock currently has the #1 game at retail, Sins of a Solar Empire.  Stardock's growing reputation as a top-tier PC game developer and publisher is something we're very proud of.  Developed by Ironclad, Sins of a Solar Empire is a space based RTS. Stardock was intimately involved in the design and development of this game, far more so than is typical in a developer/publisher relationship. We think that this approach is what has helped make the game the top rated PC game of 2008 so far and the best selling PC game right now.

Stardock does not plan to significantly increase the # of PC game titles it publishes. It will only publish titles that it feels it can give the amount of attention to that will ensure that when people see a game with the Stardock label on it that the user knows it is a great game.

Stardock's also working on The Political Machine 2008. This game is going to be sweet.  We did a version in 2004 which we cranked out in literally 6 months from scratch.  But with The Political Machine 2008, we were able to use the new 3D strategy game engine we've developed for the fantasy strategy game we're working on and the results have been phenomenal. All the candidates are bobble heads and the player designs them from scratch.

Given the interest from retailers, I will be surprised if The Political Machine 2008 isn't one of the top 20 or so best selling PC titles of 2008. Maybe next time we'll be able to get our act together to release a console version at the same time.

In addition to The Political Machine being an outstanding game, it's going to come with an outstanding website. I've not seen anyone try to do a social networking site on politics before. If you want to check out the beta site, go here. It's still on a test server (slow) and we're not yet satisfied with the look of it but you get an idea.

And of course, we can't forget about Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor. The expansion pack is in the final stages of development.

The fantasy strategy game we're working on will be announced as soon as we have enough time to get enough "assets" together to show off what we're doing.  Stay tuned on that.

My Desktop

Stardock's main desktop product is called Object Desktop.  We have two other programs in addition that are popular called CursorFX and ObjectDock but Object Desktop is Stardock's most popular product.

We sell the individual programs of Object Desktop which are immensely popular in their own right.  The three most popular Object Desktop programs are WindowBlinds (which can change the look of the Windows graphical user interface), IconPackager (which can change all the icons on Windows) and DesktopX (which can extend Windows to more natively support gadgets and widgets than other implementations).

Since its release, Object Desktop has been, by far, the dominating piece of software for power users to customize Windows. We're the Electronic Arts of digital customization. And I mean that both in the good sense and the bad sense (i.e. we get beat up by users who think our software is "bloated" or "buggy" or whatever).  It's a multi-million dollar market to be sure.  We have more users on our desktop enhancement software than we do on our games by far. A lot of the controversy comes from power users who actually aren't power users who really shouldn't be tweaking their computer in the first place.

MyColors

And so for the past year and a half, we've been working on a customization package designed for the mainstream: MyColors.  MyColors is a package that lets people pick a theme, press a button, have have their desktop change.

We just released MyColors 2008 which even takes care of updating itself and the themes. We've had some growing pains with getting the authentification of serial numbers nailed down and some people have had problems downloading but the last of those issues should be gone in the next couple of days. It's just an immense project involving so many different parts of the company that it took a bit of time to get everyone on the same page.

There's hundreds of MyColors themes available though with more coming on the way. The NBA themes are almost done and we've got a series of inspirational themes in the works. A lot of time is being spent getting classic content updated to Windows Vista and released as MyColors themes. 

Most of the major OEMs have expressed an interest in bundling MyColors on their systems with some of them already committed to doing so later this year.

DeskScapes

There's a ton of work on various desktop items including DeskScapes, which is our animated wallpaper program on Windows Vista. But we still have quite a bit of work to do in stability before this is ready for prime time. We'll likely be doing an open beta in the near future to help nail down this program.

Other Goodies

Object Desktop users got a sneak peek at IconDeveloper 2. It's a program designed to make it easier for people to take images and turn them into good looking desktop icons. Version 2 supports the new Windows Vista icon format and is a complete rewrite.  WindowBlinds 6.1 is in development and supports glass explorer backgrounds and other cool stuff.  Once we get Object Desktop 2008 out the door, we want to start concentrating more on 64-bit Vista support which right now is spotty.

My Tools

Our long-term project with ThinkDesk has been a real challenge for us.  Multiplicity and KeepSafe have continued to evolve.  TweakVista has been a big hit with 1.1 getting a very positive response. As much as we want Microsoft to improve Windows Vista, it is proving to be a good business for us to make software to fix it.  We're planning to eventually add TweakVista to ThinKDesk (our suite of tools) even though ThinkDesk is in a perpetual beta.

KeepSafe 2.0 is being worked on. You can check  out its updated UI here:

My Community

This month we re-launched the all new JoeUser.com.  This is the free blogging community we've built. We plan to aggressively add more social networking features into it shortly to allow bloggers to better organize their friends lists and interact with other people.  We're not intending JoeUser to compete with a Facebook or MySpace.  Rather, we want to be able to gather together people who like to socially interact online in terms of writing and let them work together -- as a community.

And lastly, WinCustomize.com, our most popular website, has seen its traffic grow and grow this past year.  Its due to get a major bit of work later this year based on the new JoeUser technology.