If you've read Techcrunch, Gamasutra, GamesIndustry, Gamespot, GamingOnLinux, Joystiq, Destructoid (and more) today, you may have seen the news that Desura has been acquired by Linden Lab, the makers of shared creative spaces including Second Life, Patterns, Creatorverse, Versu, and dio.
In a press release on the Linden Lab site, Rod Humble, CEO of Linden Lab, said "Desura's talented team, thriving business, and impressive technology are a great fit for Linden Lab... This acquisition gives us a global platform for serving creative developers of all kinds, and we're looking forward to growing both Desura's global community of gamers and its fantastic portfolio of thousands of games, mods, and other content. Our aim is to invest and support the Desura team in making it the most open and developer-friendly platform in the world." .
For our community of gamers, publishers, and developers, rest assured Desura shall continue running uninterrupted. Long term, expect plenty of polish as we continually strive to innovate and differentiate ourselves as we have done in the past with our Linux client, alphafunding, mod support and self-publishing for developers. We have big plans and many ideas to explore, and the resources we now have as part of Linden Lab will allow us to do just that.
Our aim remains to put great games, mods, and downloadable content at the fingertips of players - and we look forward to doing this in a greatly expanded manner and challenging ourselves to grow with the games we support.
Best of luck to you all!
I wish you guys the best of luck - I cannot wait to see how Desura evolves :)
we live for the community and games we represent... big plans hopefully not too far away!
This is very good to hear!
Does this mean they bought everything moddb.com related, or just the distribution service?
ModDB / IndieDB / SlideDB remain independent as they always have, under www.dbolical.com
Here's to a new version of the client app! :-)
Careful there... Linden Lab failed miserably when they redesigned the Second Life viewer... took years for them to get it straightened out... sort of.
Interesting, best of luck.
Congrats Scott everyone involved. Best of luck.
The press release is a bit ambiguous though. Is this an acquisition of the just the client or the entire company and it's assets?
:S
Not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, I'm sure you're probably slightly more financially secure now but on the other hand I liked you as you were. Please don't change for the worse!
By which I mean, don't introduce client based DRM.
Seriously, I'm begging you.
I have to second this. I hope this only brings good things, and not DRM. When considering the other distributors that exist, client based DRM would only hurt Desura.
You echo the concerns of a great many... of that I am sure...
wow, I've just read about this. Congrats and best of luck! :)
i hope this will be so good for Linux gaming too
It probably will not, as Linden Labs has never been known for being particularly Linux friendly as a company. Their own product (Second Life) has a Linux version, but it's always been notoriously buggy as sin, and they've been trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to put the "open source genie" back in the bottle ever since they open sourced their SL Viewer. The RIGHT move for them would have rather been to willingly accept the many community offered bugfixes and patches they were freely offered by open source developers in the early days, but they have a bad cases of "Not Invented Here" syndrome, so only time will tell if they'll begin to treat Desura in similar fashion or if their purchase of Desura is rather a sign that the've learned something as a company and are ready to take steps to improve things.
This is great news, I hope you now have enough resources to have a proper developer pick up the work on the Desurium client.
spot on!
I wish all best me and to gamers and moders too.
Sounds like great news. Best wishes for all!
Wow, don't know what to think really... On one hand, I'm happy for you guys but on the other hand I can't get enthusiastic about another big company taking over. I need to let this sink in I guess.
Glad to hear that ModDB, IndieDB and SlideDB will stay as it was.
Hope all goes well for Desura! =D
I'm not sure how to feel about this right now, I will just have to wait and see how it unfolds for us.
Hopefully, like others have said, LL will not start bringing DRM gaming to Desura. I rather like Desura as-is, so hopefully they'll just continue to polish its features.
Only experience I've had with LL is Second Life, and I've been a user for about 5-6 years now. Don't think I can compare Second Life to Desura, two very seperate things.
o.o Long Live Viva Revolution!
I also wish you all the best of luck and hope to see only good stuff coming from this.
(Y) GOOD LUCK WIDDAT! :D
How about that....
Ride the waaaaave
and don't fall doooown
Does that mean we can get the Second Life client on desura?
As a long-time resident of Second Life (7+ years) I can say that I am absolutely and completely dissapointed by this announcement. I wish I heard about this before I registered with Desura. I suppose now I need to decide whether I will stay here or not. Dealing with LL in SL is bad enough.