Desura

» see desura.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

desura was one of the small crop of indie-friendly game stores that spent the early 2010s trying to be an alternative to steam without directly picking a fight with it. it opened in december 2010 out of an australian outfit called desuranet, the same team that ran moddb, and its entire pitch was that indies who could not get through valve's gatekeeping could still reach a paying audience.

the pitch worked for about three years. by 2013 desura had a real catalog and a steamworks-style client, mod distribution built in since moddb was in the same family. in july 2013 linden lab acquired it in a move that looked like a lifeline, and sixteen months later offloaded it to bad juju games. bad juju filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy in june 2015.

the receivership dragged the store through 2015 and into 2016. onepay bought the assets in october 2016, but by then the servers had already gone dark in september. developers had stopped seeing payouts as early as 2014. some users lost access to games they had paid for and never got refunds. the store name later came back under different operators as a browser games site, unrelated to the original.

i was on steam from 2007 and my indie library grew inside it. desura was a name i knew from moddb, since anyone who touched half-life or homm mods in the mid-2000s knew the moddb site, but i never made an account at the store. by the time i might have needed a steam alternative, gog was already the answer and desura was already dying under its second owner.

~ the case file ~

~ the pitch ~

desuranet's argument in 2010 was that steam was becoming too curated for the indie tail. valve was starting greenlight later that same year to address exactly that pressure, and desura tried to get ahead of it. the promise was one-click install and patching, plus revenue share more favorable than steam's 30 percent cut. the client felt like a smaller, less shiny steam. some indies did use it as a second storefront.

~ how it actually ended ~

bad juju games filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy in june 2015. developers who had been listing on desura started publicly airing unpaid royalties. some communities on reddit put together spreadsheets of who was owed what. the receivership managed to keep the store technically open through much of 2015 and 2016, but "technically open" meant users could still log in and see their libraries while new purchases dwindled.

the store went fully offline in september 2016. onepay bought the assets a month later, but never rebuilt the storefront. the moddb team, which had spun out of desuranet earlier in the arc, kept moddb running under its own domain and distanced itself from the store carcass.

~ what got buried with it ~

the idea of an indie storefront outside steam did not die with desura. itch.io was already launched by then and kept scaling. gog picked up more indie catalog, and epic games opened its store in late 2018 with an aggressive revenue-share pitch that was closer to what desura had promised in 2010 than what steam offered. what desura specifically buried was the bet that a moddb-adjacent tools company could out-execute valve on developer relations. the tools were fine. the money was not there.

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