IMO, what is needed is a cross platform, open standard(with a reference implementation liberally licensed ALA the MIT license or Apache License 2.0) API to do the kinds of things that Steamworks does(cross game chat, achievements, matchmaking, mod sharing, cloud saving etc).

The problem is that these things require a service. Some of them would work without a specific service, but matchmaking, or the social aspect of achievements, require a central site and for players to be a member of that site. At that point it doesn't matter much if the API is an open standard or not. (It matters a little, but I don't think it can become practical.)

Oh Second Life, it came and it went. Well Desura was in my eyes always the promising free underdog. I hope they stay on course but get more funding by this.

I just set the US as my country. Bam, problem solved (kind of).

As I said later, that only works if you're logged in. And logging in shouldn't be required. It should be possible to view the actual USD price without logging in. This could easily be done using a similar system to that of PC Gamestop Downloads via setting a cookie.

Yeah some of those are services but an open standard would allow competition among service providers. As is some games are not coming to GOG or have inferior GOG versions because of Steamworks or the like. If GOG and/or the developers/publishers could choose to offer those services themselves for the GOG version or even do so for all versions that would allow more games to come to GOG.

An open standard with a permissively licensed reference implementation would also allow all game developers to use such API(and in the case of services offer or access them) no matter the license of the game.

Currently games using for example the GPL'ed id Software engines(id Tech 1 - 4) can't use for example Steamworks, but they could use an open standards Steamworks competitor. If GOG were to develop such an open standard, it would take out one of the main advantages of Steam.

Steamworks is and the community on Steam is one of the reasons why I sometimes can even by enthusiastic about games using Steam.

The GOG Downloader can't compete with Steam at all on those fronts. GOG desperately needs an (optional of course) client with those kinds of features.

Imagine if GOG had an optional client that due to open standards allowed you to chat with people running Origin, Uplay, GFWL, Desura, etc!

That allowed any developer on the planet to support cross-game chat, achievements etc no matter the platform(OS and hardware platform), distribution channel(Steam, GOG, Desura, etc) or license of the game?

Ofcourse the major obstacle to such a scenario would be adoption. So the scenario above with GOG -> Origin chat would require EA to be on board. I don't know how likely that would be. But it would be awesome if GOG would at least try.

Edit:

I should add this would give us a much needed divorce between digital distribution services and the actual features of a game. Digital distrubution services could then compete on pricing, selection, customer service and what kind of DRM if any they use.

Edit2:

As is now you have to make a choice between DRM free gaming and features such as achievements, etc. This would eliminate the need to make such a choice. A *very* good thing IMO!

I'll just say: congrats on your acquisition, and I hope it brings good things to your company and its customers. Good luck!

Well, that was a surprising move. It wasn't entirely unexpected to see some change coming to Desura (they had trouble keeping the quality up, and were experimenting with other options, like non-Indie games, anyway), but I never would have guessed that Linden Labs would be interested in providing the necessary funds.

Since Linden Labs has no track record in this market, there's really no way (yet) to tell whether this change will be good or bad for Desura and its customers. We'll just have to wait and see. Second Life _did_ make some weird decisions in the past, but as far as I'm aware, the CEO has changed twice since then, and I'm not aware of any particularly bad decisions since the new one is at the helm. Let's see how it turns out.

It's nice to see the boss of Linden Labs showing up here and addressing the concerns, though. With an account that was registered in 2009 (when barely anybody had heard of GOG), it's at least clear that his interest in digital distribution platforms isn't a new thing. :)

Not necessarily; a decentralised (i.e. multiple servers that communicate with each other but are otherwise independent) way of doing this is certainly possible. Granted - it's unlikely to happen in reality (would either have to be open-source and community hosted or would have to overcome massive legal / contractual hurdles; would undermine steamworks monopoly status on features like this) - but it is technologically feasible.

[As we have Rod here, and this is GOG land ... how about you see if there's a chance to cooperate on developing that open standard? *nudge*]

I believe that Steam only charges that to help ensure the quality of the games submitted to Greenlight, and that they feed those fees back into the community.

There's a bit more to it than that. Steam Greenlight relies on users looking through the candidates and voting, but if Greenlight is full of troll submissions then people would stop looking and the entire thing would flop. Desura has nothing that depends on drawing people to vote so they have no need for such a filter.

This was what brought me some tranquility.

Hm.

Well, I'm mostly interested in ModDB, since several games that I play are old and mods for them are getting harder to find. So it's very good to know that there are no immediate plans to change anything on that front.

That said, it's obvious that Linden Labs does have plans to change some things. They wouldn't have bought Desura if they didn't think they could do things better (i.e. differently).

My one request is that changes be communicated very clearly and far in advance. That will help alleviate a lot of the concerns, if people know what's coming in advance and why it's coming.

Yeah, it's obviously a personal account rather than one set up for PR purposes, this also makes me less worried.
As far as I understand, ModDB isn't part of this deal so it's more that Desura is moving away from ModDB and IndieDB (and leaving them behind, exactly where they were).