Stardock Corporation is one of those few companies in game development that are privately held - that is they don't have public shareholders that they need to behold themselves accountable to. But every year they release a report that lets their consumers know what's been going on at the company, and what they're planning to do in the coming year. The latest of these offers a rather rare and interesting look into the inner workings of both the application software development, and the games development arms of Stardock. There's a lot of stuff in there (which I recommend everyone has a read of), but I'm just going to bring up a couple of the really big stories that needed some special attention.

Stardock sold their digital distribution arm - Impulse, to Gamestop in March 2011, and spent most of the next year and a half working out what to do with the money they recieved from the sale. Rather than use the capital to expand their business, the powers that be have decided to use it to create an investment fund with the following principles:

• We should use this capital to help the next generation of software and game developers.
• We should use this capital to help found new game studios and new software ventures.
• We will strive to have a minority share in these entities in the long-run.
• These entities should produce things that will help future start-ups in the technology industry.

It's a noble goal, and one that Stardock will be revealing more information about as the year progresses and the ideas they're helping become a reality come closer to that goal.

The other story is that Stardock Entertainment will be announcing at least two new games this year, which may or may not be related to Soren Johnson joining the development team(s) there. They also talk about how the last few years have treated strategy games, attributing a decline in innovation to a single reason - the need to continue supporting 32 bit operating systems, and Windows XP in particular, hobbling the entire industry. With DirectX 11 and nearly a decade of being reigned in by the old limitations, Stardock at least is ready to begin a new status quo in strategy game development, and I'm excited to see what they accomplish.