Desura has changed hands again with a press release from Linden Lab stating :
As has just been announced, Bad Juju Games has acquired Desura from Linden Lab.
Bad Juju has taken over all day-to-day support, maintenance, and ongoing enhancements to the Desura website and service platform. The Bad Juju team will be reaching out directly to developers with games on Desura and are happy to respond to any questions they may have.
Transitioning Desura to a new owner is great for Linden Lab and our customers, as it allows us to further enhance our focus on creating the ambitious next-generation virtual world, while continuing to improve Second Life and growing Blocksworld.
Desura is a fantastic platform for game developers and players, and we look forward to seeing it continue to evolve and grow, now as part of Bad Juju Games.
The post on the Bad Juju games website explains that this is not a suddent process :
Indie Game and Middleware Tools Developer Bad Juju Games®, today announced that it has officially acquired Desura™, a comprehensive digital distribution service for PC, Mac and Linux gamers from its former owner and operator Linden Lab®. The move comes after several months of coordinated planning by the companies to ensure uninterrupted operation of the Desura service as well as a comprehensive roadmap of new features that will significantly benefit both its users and game developers during the upcoming months and beyond.
Linden Lab has begun an ambitious project to create the next generation of virtual worlds, while continuing to improve Second Life®, and grow Blocksworld®. Transitioning Desura to Bad Juju Game ship enables the company to enhance the focus of its resources on these priorities, while ensuring that spirit of Desura’s original vision lives on and game developers and players on the platform continue to be well served.
Linden Lab acquired Desura in July 2013 and personally I felt they were doing the right thing by spreading their wings into other areas. However Linden Lab have cutback on some of the purchases during the Rod Humble and Desura follows the likes of Versu, Creatoverse. Dio and Patterns out of the door. Now to be fair to the Lab, they have found new homes for two of those products and they are interested in hearing proposals on Patters. This is better than letting products disappear.
Whether this is good or bad for Linden Lab’s long term interests only time will tell. Many Second Life users felt that these other ventures were distractions and preventing Linden Lab from developing Second Life in a satisfactory manner.
On the other hand I still feel Linden Lab need to be known as a developer rather than being known as tagline to Second Life. However this does now mean Linden Lab can concentrate their resources on their core and future virtual world products and that may very well be a good thing for all concerned.
This is an unexpected event. Months after acquiring it, Linden Lab sells Desura. This is a radical shift from the previous plans of diversifying products. LL has decided to place all its bets on SL2. It’s going to be a challenge in a market that looks like is going to be crowded soon. So, this was after several months of coordinate efforts? They started working on this shortly after they bought it? Oops, we did a mistake!
Personally I thought it was right for Linden Lab to diversify their product range but under Ebbe they have decided to narrow their scope. Whether this works out well only time will tell.
This move certainly took me by surprise but reading a few other blogs on this, in particular Inara Pey’s, it probably shouldn’t have been that surprising at all.