Stardock's Impulse adds social network
Steam rival to get friends list, profiles.
Stardock has announced that it will be updating its digital distribution service, Impulse, with a social networking service that allows players to create friends lists, communicate through instant messages and find people to play with through a profile.
The service, called Ready-to-Play, allows you to set up a profile that broadcasts your interests and preferred gaming style to other gamers, and search those profiles yourself, so you can hopefully find like-minded people to play with.
Sins of a Solar Empire publisher Stardock said that the idea behind the service was to streamline matchmaking and reduce some of the pain of trying to find decent matches by creating a community that persists across different games.
It's not a million miles away from some of the features Blizzard announced for the new Battle.net at BlizzCon at the weekend.
The new Phase IV version of Impulse will also allow you to download games without using the Impulse client.
Ready-to-Play beta codes will be available at the PAX show next month. Kotaku has the details.