Stardock CEO Brad Wardell has spoken out on their Impulse game download service and competing with Valve's Steam before but in a new editorial on the Edge Online site Wardell goes even further, saying that Steam's lead in this kind of service may be fleeting.

Wardell feels that while Steam has 20 million accounts only 1.5 million actually log on each dayAs he states, "When one of these services has 20 million active users per day, then I think we can say that they have reached a critical thresholdRight now, however, by Valve's own statistics, about half of Steam users use it for just Counterstrike -- not including all of Valve's other games." Wardell feels Valve will find itself fighting off competition with services like his own Impulse for a piece of the downloadable gaming pie.

The final word? "Steam does a lot of things rightBut there's certainly room for improvement which viable competition encouragesAfter all, MySpace once looked unbeatable in the social networking world but such premature assumptions look quaint in 'the age of Facebook.'"