In a few weeks, Stardock will be officially unveiling Impulse Reactor, a virtual platform SDK that will let developers tie in the kinds of services that currently would require a combination of Steamworks, Games for Windows or GameSpy into a single package.

While Impulse Reactor provides features like achievements, multiplayer matchmaking, chat, gamer score, stats, etc.  It also provides IP protection as well and that feature is what is getting the most interest from publishers.

Impulse Reactor doesn't require a client to be installed with it or for users to create an Impulse account. It is totally neutral and designed to make it so that publishers could let their customers update their games with the digital platform of their choice (Steam, Impulse, etc.).

Developers who just want to use the IP protection can literally run a program on their game (or utility) to "wrap it".  The protection is as good (or better) than what one would get with another solution but the main benefit being that it's largely invisible to players (you don't have to "logon" to a client because Impulse Reactor is all server based).

What we are looking for is feedback on this from a consumer perspective. Since we put our software through public, no-NDA betas, we figured this should be no exception.

So here it is: http://draginol.stardock.net/docs/impulsereactor-whitepaper.pdf