I hung out in Second Life on and off for a few years. Didn't see anything out of Linden that'd raise a red flag for this acquisition.

I hope so. :-)

I used to write for a company that was bought out by Yahoo and they swore up and down "nothing will change, you'll still get the same great company you always had". blah blah blah.

Bare-faced liars, as almost all these corporations seem to be run by. Yahoo destroyed the company in less than six months and my income from it fell to 10 percent of what it was before Yahoo bought it. Yahoo has done the same with every company they own (Tumblr will be the next one that gets knifed, IMO), as has Google, and any other corporation that has bought an indie company.

Linden Labs may well be 'different' but, in my experience, not likely as it seems these companies just can't seem to help themselves getting their greedy little fingers on what was an amazing indie company and destroying it in record time flat.

We'll see.

Oh and btw, is Second Life still even running?

Haven't heard of it for years, although I did have an account there for about 10 minutes.

Oh and btw, Linden Labs seems to be quite happy with deleting things they don't like, as you can easily find out from instances when they've deleted things like Woodbury University's entire 'campus' (twice!) in Second Life with no good reason as to why, and suddenly stopped allowing gambling in the game with no warnings and no recourse to the people who had put thousands of dollars of their money into their businesses there.

No, the more I think about this I fear it will only end badly for poor Desura.

I wish you'd make at least one change. Add the ability to view prices in USD for those of us not in the US. I don't buy from Desura because the prices are only shown in JPY despite being charged in USD. The exchange rate used to display that price is a complete unknown. For example I don't know if it's from XE or someone else, I don't know if it's current, and as my CC provider handles currency conversion I have no idea if their rate will be the same.

With the price in USD, I know what I'm paying.

So if you add the ability to display the price in USD, you'll likely get a customer out of me.

(I've made this suggestion to Desura directly ever since they came out of beta, and have been ignored each and every time =/)

For one to buy, another must be willing to sell :)
After reading Rod's posts I'm pretty calm about Desu's future (and that's my second gaming place after GOG).

Maybe it is necessary to keep Desura alive as they getting bigger. I heard the team behind Desura is pretty small in number.

It'd far better to have it displayable in USD without having to log in. I log in via the client, but rather browse via a browser, or via phone when on the move. I'd rather no have to keep logging in via all 3. Even Gamestop PC Downloads provides a basic method for viewing USD prices without being logged in!

Ive been in SL for many many years and while there has been odd stuff (like the Uni issue) the Gambling thing was more a case of not having to cover and cater for multiple countries gambling laws (Since you can change real money to Lindens and then Lindens back to real money).

Im... More intrested by the news than anything. People seem to forget that Linden Labs themselves were to start with just a simple games company. I guess we shall have to wait and see for the first real update on it all before sticks and stones can be broken out.

I think probably the problem is that Desura is not getting bigger. It is more likely that it needs to be bigger to be alive, and this is a move towards that.

I'm really sad about this, I liked Desura a lot. Now I know there's a chance nothing bad will happen, but I'm still worried.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating! There is no proof hidden in the pudding!

I agree with you. I travel a lot and there are plenty of sites that just keep either redirecting me to the local version or show prices in currencies I don't use despite my best efforts to browse in a language of which I have working knowledge. =( Sadly, I get happy when I do find a workaround, like the Desura one. It's not ideal by far and I hope they do implement a way to choose display currency.

One of Desura's greatest strengths has been how it's a happy medium between GOG and Steam. The ability to have DRM free installers for people who want them as well as an optional client for those who prefer using a client is what makes Desura what it is. Please do not lose sight of that.

These all sound good. I've heard from developers that Desura can be difficult to work with because of the small number of staff.

My big request is that you don't add any kind of DRM system into the client. Your greatest strengths for me are in how you differ from Steam, namely the lack of store endorsed DRM and the inclusion of standalone installers. I'd be even happier if you adopted a hard DRM-free policy on new releases but I understand it can be hard to convince some developers.

Still, it seems to be working for GOG, they seem to be considered the 2nd most important PC digital distributor nowadays...

Anyway, thanks for coming and talking to us!