Why Linden Lab's Selling of Desura Might Be The Smartest Thing It's Ever Done -- Wait, This Sounds Familiar

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

When news broke last night that Linden Lab had sold Desura, I wasn't surprised. A little over a year ago when Linden Lab initially announced that it had acquired the indie gaming community's answer to Steam, I wrote that it might have been their smartest pick amid a wave of buying up diverse programs and platforms. But that statement came with a pretty big caveat, and that caveat is why if anything I was surprised that Linden Lab hadn't handed Desura off sooner.

At the time of the acquisition, it seemed like Linden Lab had been buying up a bunch of things, doing the bare minimum required to support them and hoping something would eventually (magically) stick. Buying Desura seemed like a smart move because as an independent game distribution platform it was already sticking -- it wouldn't require the same community building attention that many of the other projects that had been acquired needed and weren't receiving. It stood on its own. In my opinion all Linden Lab needed to do, as I wrote at the time, was maintain Desura as it was and nudge it towards fixing its biggest flaw: Navigability.

Desura was/is a tangled and seemingly bottomless web of products, some great and some decidedly less so. While it was the place to go for DRM-free games, as well as games that hadn't quite broken through Steam's unpleasant Greenlight progress, it was very difficult to browse without any specific titles in mind. The same could be said of the Second Life Marketplace, but that's beside the point. What matters is that precious little progress was made on this front until this past August, at which point a new player in indie game distribution had already gained considerable ground against Desura. Itch.io is smaller, cleaner, and became a top choice for many indie and alt developers in the past year, alongside a handful of other smaller distribution sites.

All of this is why I was surprised that Desura wasn't part of the same purge as Versu when Ebbe Altberg decided to trim off the excess and move Linden Lab's focus back towardso virtual worlds alone. Then again, selling takes a lot more time that shuttering, so maybe the delay was unavoidable. Either way, this is probably the best outcome for everyone involved. Desura would have been a smart buy if Linden Lab had known what to do with it, but the platform's new owners at Bad Juju Games (a middleware developer that boasts an impressive client list) may be in a better position to get Desura back on track.

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Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart on Twitter, Iris Ophelia in Second Life) has been writing about virtual worlds and video games for nearly a decade, and has had her work featured on Paste, Kotaku, Jezebel and The Mary Sue.

Comments

[Roblem VR]

Always felt like they picked up Desura so they could make it do things that Steam was never going to do for SL, like maybe get marketplace integration. (also felt like that was why they made some of the "controversial" changes to the TOS.) Indy Game distribution just isn't LL vertical market and it feels like a stretch now. All seems pretty moot with the Next-gen world on the way.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Buying Desura was a very Google/Amazon like move to make. And that works for Google/Amazon, but not everybody.

Kind of like... You're CHANEL, or Lancôme, so you buy Macy's... so you can control where your product is sold.

Tech companies have been doing that... but it doesn't mean its wise, even for other tech companies.

[Ciaran Laval]

Yes Desura was purchased when Linden Lab's attempts to get Second Life on Steam failed.

At the time it seemed a sensible move but Iris is bang on the money when she says Linden Lab needed to do something with Desura.

I'm glad that Linden Lab try to offload products these days, rather than just close them.

[EI Consulting]

What was the Desura purchase and selling price?

[shirc desantis]

Does make sense all round - plus thanks for the reminder, the itch thing had slipped my mind.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Did they fail to get on Steam or just give up on getting on steam?

I was skeptical of the Steam move back when it was the hot topic because I felt it could lead to them having to reign in some of SL's wild nature.

While 'gamergate' shows that those gamer people on steam are a lot worse than our excesses...
...SL is more open about its odd side.

[Fred]

Yeah, what about Steam? I saw some potential in that, it would atleast get more views and potential users that way.

Not every post on this blog is about gamergate Pussycat.. :)