Ironclad has released three main expansions, which are available on Ironclad's website and Stardock's digital distribution service, Impulse.
Stardock |
According to Stardock's CEO Brad Wardell, as of March 2008, Galactic Civilizations II has sold around 300,000 copies in total, bringing in an eight-figure revenue, on a development budget of less than $1 million.
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The story of Galactic Civilizations II and the back plot of the ingame universe it inhabits is based on a series of short stories written by Stardock CEO Brad Wardell.
In the early 1990s Westerfeld joined a startup gaming company named Stardock where he was deeply involved in developing Object Desktop for OS/2.
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He is best known for his work on IBM OS/2 software such as Object Desktop for Stardock and the KWQ/2 News reader client for OS/2.
Object Desktop — initially entitled The Workplace Toolset/2 — was developed over three years by Brad Wardell and Kurt Westerfeld subsequent to Stardock's OS/2 Essentials, a pre-registered set of OS/2 shareware.
While Stardock Central started development in 2001, it got its biggest test in March 2003 when Galactic Civilizations was launched simultaneously at retail and online — the first commercial PC game to debut in both venues at once.